Just to add a little more to Paul Pantera's e-mail....

The Triangulator in Java3D is a Polygon Triangulator - a specific case
of general purpose Triangulators based on Delaunay, advancing front etc.
If you feed in an n-sided polygon to the Triangulator, it will
generate n-2 triangles AND will do so WITHOUT generating any new
verticies in the interior or on the boundary. Thus, the grid density
is automatically predefined by the input polygon.

Even a simple quad is in general not guaranteed to be planar. If a non
-planar quad is fed to the Triangulator it will ( as above ) produce
just 2 triangles and these may not be hugging the quad surface at all.
To get a high-fidelity triangulation of such a quad, you could subdivide
the quad into a few more quads and feed them all together as a
quad array to the Triangulator.

Raj Vaidya

On Wed, 17 Oct 2001 12:19:42 -0700, Paul Pantera <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>The triangulator is designed to work on planar polygons.  If
>your polygon isn't planar, it's projected onto a plane.  It's
>not designed to work on a half cylindrical surface made up of
>a single curved polygon.  It simply turns polygons into
>triangles.
>
>-Paul
>
>
>> Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> MIME-Version: 1.0
>> Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2001 11:30:08 -0700
>> From: Rajamiyer Ravichandran <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> Subject: Re: [JAVA3D] Possible to control trianglulator?
>> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>
>> My experience with Triangulator has been disappointing
>> particularly for the curved surfaces. For example, I
>> have a half cylindrical surface with a hole in it.
>> Since there is no way to control the triangle density,
>> I see a triangle fan. Also many triangles are not
>> exactly on the cylindrical surface. Some of the edges
>> of the triangles form a chord along the cylindrical
>> edge. There could be a serious falw in the
>> triangulator algorithm.
>>
>> Now from the GeometryInfo object I create a "Delaunay
>> Triangulation" myself instead of relying on the
>> Triangulator class. I wish they provide the sourec
>> code of the class.
>>
>> Ravi
>>
>>
>>
>> --- "Dvorak, Daniel J."
>> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> > In looking at the coordinates contained in a
>> > GeometryArray, I just
>> > discovered that the Triangulator is dividing a
>> > simple 4-sided polygon into
>> > what looks like a triangle fan with 14 triangles.  I
>> > believe this is causing
>> > my application to take much more memory than it
>> > should, as I'm drawing a lot
>> > of 4-sided polygons.
>> >
>> > I use GeometryInfo to load my geometry.  Is there
>> > some way to specify the
>> > triangle density that the triangulator generates?
>> > In my application, two
>> > triangles would be sufficient for a 4-sided polygon,
>> > and would probably
>> > conserve memory.
>> >
>> > Daniel Dvorak
>> >
>>
>>
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