Hughes/Computer Graphics, 3/E

Chapter 25. Meshes

25.1. Introduction

Back in Chapter 8, we introduced meshes as a way to represent shapes in computer graphics. We now return to examine meshes in more detail, because they dominate present-day graphics. The vertex-and-face-tables model we introduced in Chapter 8 is widely used to represent triangle meshes, which are almost universally used in hardware rendering, because triangles are automatically convex and planar and there’s only one possible way to linearly interpolate values at the three vertices of a triangle. Quad meshes, in which each face has four vertices, are also interesting in various situations. Indexing a regular planar quad mesh is very simple compared to indexing a regular planar triangle mesh, for instance. ...