# How to triangulate a surface from point cloud

**URL:** https://discourse.vtk.org/t/how-to-triangulate-a-surface-from-point-cloud/2240
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [December 9, 2019, 3:58pm UTC](https://discourse.vtk.org/t/how-to-triangulate-a-surface-from-point-cloud/2240 "2019-12-09T15:58:12Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 4

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### Author: ![Paulo\_Carvalho](https://discourse.vtk.org/user_avatar/discourse.vtk.org/paulo_carvalho/32/370_2.png) [@Paulo\_Carvalho](https://discourse.vtk.org/u/Paulo_Carvalho)
#### Post date: [December 10, 2019, 2:24pm UTC](https://discourse.vtk.org/t/how-to-triangulate-a-surface-from-point-cloud/2240/4 "2019-12-10T14:24:36Z")

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Hello, Thomas. Your problem is called “mesh generation” (a.k.a tesselation) which is an entire research field in itself. Please, take a look at this: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4882993/mesh-generation-from-points-with-x-y-and-z-coordinates](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4882993/mesh-generation-from-points-with-x-y-and-z-coordinates) for suggestions of libraries specialized on mesh generation.

VTK of course has such an algorithm in a class called `vtkDelaunay3D` but, as stated in the topic, Delaunay 3D may yield poor results depending, of course, on your input data set (point cloud).

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