FINAL EXTRA CREDIT: MESHES

A mesh graphic, or a polygon mesh is a group of faces and vertices that create the shape of a polyhedral in computer graphics. It is usually comprised of quadrilaterals and other convex polygons. The concept of polygon meshes is a huge part of computer graphics and there are a variety of meshes are utilized for different goals that these programmers have.

To create one of these polygon meshes, there are some criteria that need to be made. First of all, the meshes must have edges, face, vertices, polygons and surfaces. However, many times, vertices and edges are the ones that are used the most. Furthermore, renderers can use a variety of polygons, such as 3 sided faces or quads. Some polygons are used for different modeling such as creating a head of a person.

I named some of the criteria above that are necessary to create a polygon mesh. I will now try and define some of them so it is easier to follow along. A vertex is a position where two lines meet and an edge is the connection between two vertices. Furthermore a face is an enclosed set of edges. For example, penta face has 5 edges and a quad face has 4 edges. Most of the time, we will not see more than 4 since a lot of hardware these days only support 3-4 sides faces.

There are many ways that a polygon mesh can be represented. One of the ways is a winged edge mesh, where each edge points to two vertices, two faces, and four edges that touch it. There are benefits to this, but also downsides, such as higher storage requirements. Furthermore, you can do a vertex-vertex mesh which uses only vertices that point to other vertices. This is one of the simplest ways, but it is very inefficient and does not allow many operations to be performed on the mesh.