How to merge adjacent coplanar faces on a mesh

Question

I am looking for a method / algorithm that will allow me to merge several adjacent coplanar faces on a 3d mesh into a single face. I am hoping that this will optimize my mesh generation program, because right now it generates many 'little' triangles. When I look at the final 3d object on the screen, I can see that they all are oriented in the same direction and they could be replaced with one bigger triangle that encompasses the whole lot! I hope that is clear what I am trying to do. Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

I'm also trying to do a similar approach. The Sympy library has a function that could do this

http://docs.sympy.org/latest/_modules/sympy/geometry/plane.html#Plane.is_coplanar

Answer 2

I would suggest you project the faces in a single plane and than apply an algorithm for polygon uninon a plane. After that "unproject" and that's it. Always try to reduce dimensions when possible.