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From: sundar@ai.mit.edu (Sundar Narasimhan)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics
Subject: Re: Triangular patches for Polygonal Regions
Keywords: triangle polygonal
Message-ID: <14303@life.ai.mit.edu>
Date: 23 Mar 91 19:04:11 GMT
References: <1991Mar21.211018.1085@truevision.com>
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Reply-To: sundar@ai.mit.edu
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
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In article <1991Mar21.211018.1085@truevision.com>, bobz@truevision.com (Bob Zigon) writes:
|> I'm sure this is a common question, but I can't find any references
|> on decomposing polygonal regions into triangular patches. If anyone
|> could offer a quick algorithm description or the name of some
|> references, I would be very appreciative.
I tried email but it bounced, so here goes:

It is hard to understand what exactly you are looking for from your
message, but if your input polygons are 2d you may want to start with:

%A Fournier, A. and Montuno, D. Y.
%T Triangulating Simple Polygons and Equivalent Problems
%J ACM Transactions on Graphics
%V 3
%N 2
%M April
%P 153-174
%Y 1984

Chazelle has other papers on triangulation as well, but I don't have 
the references handy.

If your input data is in 3d (i.e. your data points define a surface
that you wish to triangulate), the problem is harder because there
are potentially many different surfaces that pass through/near your
data points that you could be interested in.