unindex-mesh

Takes a list of vertices and faces, giving you back an array of individual triangles.

In most cases with WebGL, you'll want to stick with indexed geometry - i.e. providing a list of unique vertices and the faces that consume them, rather then including a bunch of duplicate vertices to make each face. This way, you consume less memory and maybe get some performance benefits too. That's why modules like bunny are formatted this way.

One exemption to this case is if you want to for an intentionally flat polygonal look. If you use indexed geometry you'll have forced interpolation between your faces, getting rid of hard edges: this is normally a good thing, but it spoils the low-poly look if that's what you're after.

So for interoperability/convenience this module can take indexes meshes and output a Float32Array of individual triangles ready to send over to the GPU.

Usage

require('unindex-mesh')(positions, faces[, out])

positions is an array of vertex positions and faces is a list of faces. The number of points for each face and dimension of each position is determined by the first position/face supplied.

out is an optional argument for including your own array to output the result into. If not passed, a Float32Array of the correct length will be created for you.

var faceNormals = require('mesh-normals')
var unindex = require('unindex-mesh')
var bunny = require('bunny')

var lowpoly = unindex(bunny.positions, bunny.cells)
var lowpolynormals = faceNormals(lowpoly)

require('unindex-mesh')(mesh[, out])

Alternatively, you can pass in an object with the properties positions and cells in place of the previous positions and faces arguments respectively.

var faceNormals = require('mesh-normals')
var unindex = require('unindex-mesh')
var lowpoly = unindex(require('bunny'))
var lowpolynormals = faceNormals(lowpoly)

License

MIT. See LICENSE.md for details.