A triangle strip is a series of connected triangles, sharing vertices, allowing for more efficient memory usage for computer graphics. They are more efficient than triangle lists without indexing, but usually equally fast or slower than indexed triangle lists. The primary reason to use triangle strips is to reduce the amount of data needed to create a series of triangles. The number of vertices stored in memory is reduced from 3N to N+2, where N is the number of triangles to be drawn. This allows for less use of disk space, as well as making them faster to load into RAM.
For example, the four triangles in the diagram, without using triangle strips, would have to be stored and interpreted as four separate triangles: ABC, CBD, CDE, and EDF. However, using a triangle strip, they can be stored simply as a sequence of vertices ABCDEF. This sequence would be decoded as a set of triangles ABC, BCD, CDE and DEF then every even-numbered (with counting starting from one) triangle would be reversed resulting in the original triangles.
Read more about Triangle Strip: OpenGL Implementation, Properties and Construction
Famous quotes containing the word strip:
“Perfect present has no existence in our consciousness. As I said years ago in Erewhon, it lives but upon the sufferance of past and future. We are like men standing on a narrow footbridge over a railway. We can watch the future hurrying like an express train towards us, and then hurrying into the past, but in the narrow strip of present we cannot see it. Strange that that which is the most essential to our consciousness should be exactly that of which we are least definitely conscious.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)