Important Operations of Polygonal Mesh
Basically, meshes can be used for an extremely wide range of important activities. While some of these roughly match with the 3D object manipulations in the actual world as well, some do not. The most important operations with polygonal meshes include:
- Creation: To create new geometry from some other required mathematical object by some techniques like loft, revolve, extrude, marching cubes, and so on.
- Binary Creation: To create a new mesh from a binary operation of two other meshes as per requirement like add, subtract, intersect, union, attach, and so on.
- Deformation: To move only the vertices of a mesh as per requirement like deform, band, twist, and so on.
- Manipulation: To modify the geometry of the mesh, but not necessarily topology as per requirement like displace, subdivide, cut, simplify, and so on.
- Measurement: To compute some value of the mesh as per requirement like volume, surface area, fitting, cross-section, centroid, center of mass, and so on.
Polygonal Modeling in Computer Graphics
Polygonal modeling is a very beneficial technique that is used in 3D computer graphics to model objects by utilizing polygon meshes to approximate or represent their surfaces. For real-time computer graphics, polygonal modeling is the preferred technique for its features, since it works well with scanline rendering. NURBS surfaces, subdivision surfaces, and equation-based (implicit surface) representations, which are very useful and seen in ray tracers, are some more approaches to modeling 3D objects. As they would have no use for the models, their required investments would yield meager returns to process overall tasks.