[vtkusers] vtkTriangleStrip and empty vtkSTLWriter output

[Sean McBride]

Cory,

Thanks for this.

So, for the benefit of the archives, does this mean one doesn't need to invoke vtkTriangleFilter before any of: vtkPLYWriter, vtkSTLWriter, vtkPolyDataWriter? 

Sean



On Tue, 12 Sep 2017 08:58:21 -0400, Cory Quammen said:

>Hi folks,
>
>Following up on this now almost 2-year-old thread, I have a merge
>request in VTK that adds on the fly triangulation of arbitrary
>polygons into triangles in vtkSTLWriter.
>https://gitlab.kitware.com/vtk/vtk/merge_requests/3260
>
>I welcome your reviews.
>
>Thanks!
>Cory
>
>On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 12:47 PM, Bill Lorensen
><bill.lorensen at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I believe that PLY  and VTK can handle non-triangles.
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 12:13 PM, Sean McBride <sean at rogue-
>research.com> wrote:
>>> On Thu, 15 Oct 2015 13:17:42 -0400, Bill Lorensen said:
>>>
>>>>I looked at the STLWriter code:
>>>>
>>>>1) It reports an error if a polygon is not a triangle.
>>>>2) It reports nothing if there are triangle strips.
>>>>
>>>>At a minimum I think it should handle triangle strips. No need to run
>>>>triangle filter, I'll decompose the strips on the fly.
>>>
>>> Does this cause any inconsistency wrt other similar writers?  For
>example, I just looked at our exporter code and it basically does:
>>>
>>> - create vtkTriangleFilter
>>> - switch on file type (ply, stl, vtk)
>>> - create vtkPLYWriter/vtkSTLWriter/vtkPolyDataWriter
>>>
>>> I imagine others have similar code.  I admittedly didn't check, but
>it would be nice if I could remove this vtkTriangleFilter for all cases,
>and not need it for some but not others...