Geometric Primitive Design This article describes K-3D's
geometric primitive data structures, which support rendering
more than one million polygons with usable interactivity while
providing unprecedented flexibility, including the ability to
introduce new geometric primitive types at runtime. Many of
K-3D's features - including the Visualization Pipeline, Mesh
Painters, and pluggable render engines - make it a natural
choice for working with new geometric primitive types, and the
new data structures make this easy. Geometric data in the K-3D
pipeline is stored using the k3d::mesh class. Each instance of
k3d::mesh is a container for a collection of geometric points,
and a collection of k3d::mesh::primitive objects. The points in
k3d::mesh are globally-accessible to every primitive within the
mesh, so primitives can "share" control-points, "stitching" them
together. Every instance of k3d::mesh::primitive stores a
specific type of geometric primitive, such as a polyhedron,
collection of curves, collection of NU