What are Structured & Unstructured data?

Apr 29, 2024

Structured & Unstructured Data

For the sake of our post, you just need to know that Point clouds are known to be unstructured data because they contain points in 3D space with a color value that don't have any connection information between them, whereas 3D meshes are structured data, since here each vertex has a connection with another vertex to form an edge which then connects with other edges to form a face(triangle/polygon), which can then be used represent a mesh with multiple other faces. This also means it's easier to render Point Clouds than 3D mesh, as not a lot of computation needs to be done to read and render points as is.

What is Rasterization?

Rasterization is the most commonly used (rendering) technique of generating the final image that will be displayed on the screen by projecting the 3D primitive data on the screen as 2D primitives and filling the pixels with color accordingly. It also discards pixels outside the 2D primitive and checks the triangle depth in 3D space to determine which triangle should be displayed on front when there is an overlap. (Imagine the case where there is multiple triangles/meshes in the 3D scene)