Robust Incremental Polygon Triangulation for Fast Surface Rendering

Abstract

This paper presents a simple, robust and practical, yet fast algorithm for triangulation of points on the domain of trimmed Bézier surfaces. These R 2 points are input to this algorithm by a surface sampler. A set of polygons is formed from these samples, which are then triangulated. We also show how to update the triangulation when the samples, and hence the polygons, are updated. The output is a set of triangle strips. The algorithm includes heuristics to avoid long and thin triangles. In addition, it also detects if the sampling of the trimming curve forms any non-simple polygons and corrects the triangulation by adding more samples. The triangulation algorithm is more generally applicable to polygons in a plane. We report an implementation of the algorithm and its performance on extensive surface-model walkthrough