The SGI algorithm creates triangle strip

Triangle Strip

A triangle strip is a series of connected triangles, sharing vertices, allowing for faster rendering and more efficient memory usage for computer graphics. They are optimized on most graphics cards, making them the most efficient way of describing an object. There are two primary reasons to use...

s from a set of triangles. It was published by K. Akeley, P. Haeberli, and D. Burns as a C

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

 program named "tomesh.c" for use with Silicon Graphics'

Silicon Graphics International

Silicon Graphics International Corp. , is an American manufacturer of computer hardware and software, including high-performance computing solutions, x86-based servers for datacenter deployment, and visualization products...

 IRIS GL

IRIS GL

IRIS GL was a proprietary graphics API created by Silicon Graphics for producing 2D and 3D computer graphics on their IRIX-based IRIS graphical workstations...

 API.

The algorithm operates on the set of triangles that have not yet been added to a triangle strip, starting with the entire set of input triangles. Triangles are greedily

Greedy algorithm

A greedy algorithm is any algorithm that follows the problem solving heuristic of making the locally optimal choice at each stagewith the hope of finding the global optimum....

added to a strip until no triangle is available that can be appended to the strip; a new strip will be started in this case. When choosing a triangle for starting or continuing a triangle strip, the selection is based on a triangle's degree (i.e. the number of triangles adjacent to it), with smaller degrees being preferred.

If implemented using a priority queue to quickly identify triangles that can start a new strip, the algorithm runs in linear time.