Tessellation Script

This is a quick Maya MEL script that implements an alternate tessellation scheme for triangulated polygon meshes. What this means is that when you want to subdivide one of the triangular faces o f the object into smaller triangular faces, this script gives you another option.

In both of the following pictures, the white object is the starting point. The red object is the result of Maya’s standard ‘subdivide’ command. A new point is placed at the center of each face, and edges are drawn to each center. In my alternate method, each edge is split in half, and a new face is drawn between the three new points. This creates four new faces for each original face. Each of these faces is a “similar triangle” to the original face – it has the same aspect ratio. Since this consistency is important for some geometric algorithms, I wrote a script that would give these results.

Tesselation Mel Script: tessellate.zip