Polygon soup

A polygon soup is a group of unorganized triangles, with generally no relationship whatsoever.^[1] Polygon soups are a geometry storage format in a 3D modeling package, such as Maya, Houdini, or Blender. Polygon soup can help save memory, load/write time, and disk space for large polygon meshes compared to the equivalent polygon mesh.^[2] The larger the polygon soup, the larger the savings. For instance, fluid simulations, particle simulations, rigid-body simulations, environments, and character models can reach into the millions of polygon for feature films, causing large disk space and read/write overhead. As soon as any kind of hierarchical sorting or clustering scheme is applied, the polygon soup mesh becomes something else (one example being an octree, a subdivided cube). Any kind of polygonal geometry that hasn't been grouped in any way can be considered polygon soup. Optimized meshes may contain grouped items to make drawing faster.

References

1. GameDev.net (2010). "GameDev.net – What's a polygon soup?". . Retrieved July 28, 2010. External link in |work= (help)
2. SideFX.com (2013). "SideFX.com – PolySoup surface node". . Retrieved June 25, 2013. External link in |work= (help)