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Discarding or Keeping Facet Data

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Faceting is required for rendering, but the facet data does not necessarily have to be saved. The facet data can be regenerated from the entity and the refinements attached to the entity. Even though the INDEXED_MESH is not saved to the save file, it is not deleted after rendering either. The mesh remains accessible to the application until either the entity is deleted or the application terminates. This improves performance, because faceting is not carried out repeatedly.

If an application needs to save facet information into its own data structure, it should derive its own mesh manager from either INDEXED_MESH_MANAGER, LINKED_MESH_MANAGER, or POLYGON_POINT_MESH_MANAGER. The derived class would redefine the inherited methods and enhance them to carry out the special needs of the application. For example, a class derived from the INDEXED_MESH_MANAGER would need announce_counts, announce_indexed_node, and announce_indexed_polynode methods.

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Related topics:

Refinements
Mesh Managers
The Faceting Algorithm
Step-by-Step Faceting
Faceting Functions and Classes
Faceting Using Scheme

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