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.

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