Max Area Triangulation

[Nova]

I came across this article ( http://www.humus.name/index.php?page=News&ID=228 ) today, which definitely sparked my interest. It got me wondering if something like this was ever considered for wings? It's basically a breakdown of how different kinds of triangulation performs. At the moment Wings3D creates triangle strips when performing triangulation, which according to the article is not a good way to do it, though it suggest using a "Max Area" approach to triangulation which tesselates a model by the largest area possible recursively. Depending on your purpose, you might want to use different tesselation techniques, but from a shading perspective, it actually produces the best results, at least in wings.



I know this is mostly useful from a game/performance perspective I guess. Seeing as I use Wings3D on a daily basis for games however, it of course holds some interest if something like this were ever to be implemented, though I understand if it's not in the pipeline.

Sorry if this has been discussed before, but I couldn't find anything about it.

What do you guys think? Useful or no?

[Justanother1]

In truth, triangulation is only useful long after the model is built, UV-mapped, textured and ready to go. All the useful abilities like edge loop and edge ring select don't work with triangle too well. UV-mapping triangulated meshes is tedious. Of course once your there ... but then also once your there you'll probably use some kind of Decimator, like Blender or Zbrush. This is more of an automatic process that reduces polycount for low poly models. Not real good for animated models, but for scenery and props is the Bomb! There is a Tesselate-trianulate option in Wings3d, and it works great for exporting DirectX and 3DS models. As far as topology, you can always change it!

[VladD]

I agree that this is an occasional issue, depending of the model, topology at hands. As a workaround, I explicitely triangulate only the polygons that I know from experience would otherwise most "suffer" from the auto-triangulation (from Wings as well as from most other modeling software actually).

Controling how the triangulation flows becomes especially important when we use vertex corlors, but I have a feeling that the subject only seems relevant to modelers who do export their work to game engines. I'm not sure it will get much focus, development wise.

[ggaliens]

JustAnother ... there are many many reasons for triangulating a mesh ... and doing a nice job of it.

Nova is for sure onto something good. I have considered writing the max-area tessellation to triangles many
times. The code should in fact be trival unless you want to go crazy with optimization. I like to do the theory
step first. Alas ... it might need to wait for a rainy day as I have a pile of other things I need to do first ... including
fixing shape-extruder since I broke it recently.

[Nova]

I appreciate you taking the time to consider it, ggaliens. I think at this point it would be nice with just a simple alternative, no need to go crazy with optimization. I understand if you have bigger fish on your plate

It's more of a nice to have, than a need. So I'm patient

Cheers,
Nova