Triangulation of a polygon using matplotlib

Question

I've tried to use the matplot.Delaunay for the triangulation of a simple polygon in 2D... The problem here is that I need regular triangles. The polygon is randomly created by numpy, maybe Delaunay it's not the way to go.

import matplotlib.delaunay as triang
import pylab
import numpy

# 10 random points (x,y) in the plane
x,y =  numpy.array(numpy.random.standard_normal((2,10)))
cens,edg,tri,neig = triang.delaunay(x,y)

for t in tri:
 # t[0], t[1], t[2] are the points indexes of the triangle
 t_i = [t[0], t[1], t[2], t[0]]
 pylab.plot(x[t_i],y[t_i])


pylab.plot(x,y,'^')
pylab.show()

Answer 1

I guess, triangulation by regular triangles is not a trivial task for a random polygon. However if you want to use only regular triangles, you have to define points' coordinate manually. Like in this example:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.tri as tri
import numpy as np
import math

# Creating a Triangulation without specifying the triangles results in the
# Delaunay triangulation of the points.

# First create the x and y coordinates of the points.
n_angles = 36
n_radii = 8
min_radius = 0.25
radii = np.linspace(min_radius, 0.95, n_radii)

angles = np.linspace(0, 2*math.pi, n_angles, endpoint=False)
angles = np.repeat(angles[..., np.newaxis], n_radii, axis=1)
angles[:, 1::2] += math.pi/n_angles

x = (radii*np.cos(angles)).flatten()
y = (radii*np.sin(angles)).flatten()

# Create the Triangulation; no triangles so Delaunay triangulation created.
triang = tri.Triangulation(x, y)

# Mask off unwanted triangles.
xmid = x[triang.triangles].mean(axis=1)
ymid = y[triang.triangles].mean(axis=1)
mask = np.where(xmid*xmid + ymid*ymid < min_radius*min_radius, 1, 0)
triang.set_mask(mask)

# Plot the triangulation.
plt.figure()
plt.gca().set_aspect('equal')
plt.triplot(triang, 'bo-')
plt.title('triplot of Delaunay triangulation')

plt.show()