I've worked using Maya for animation and more film orientated projects however I am also focusing on my studies on video game development. Anyways, I was talking with one of my professor and we couldn't figure out why all game engines (that I know of) convert to triangles.
Anyone happen to know why game engines convert to triangles compared to leaving the models as four sided polygons? Also what are the pros and cons (if any) of doing this?
Answer
The bottom line is Triangle Rasterization, which is how computers render objects to the screen. Though others say it more elquently than I:
All 3D objects that we see on the computer screen are actually made of tiny little geometrical objects often called primitives. Quadrilaterals, triangles, n-gons etc. are example of primitives. We will concentrate on triangles mostly because of one main reason: every object can be split into triangles but a triangle cannot be split into anything else than triangles. Because of this, drawing triangles is a lot simpler than drawing polygons of higher order; less things to deal with. This is why those triangles are so commonly used in computer graphics.
Emphasis mine. Source: http://www.devmaster.net/articles/software-rendering/part3.php
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