Polygon triangulation is the process of dividing a polygon into simple triangles. It is one of the fundamental algorithms in computational geometry. Polygons generally are complicated shapes and not always convex. This alone makes it difficult to draw a polygon in say OpenGL. Triangles on the other hand are always convex, very easy to draw and can be used in many other algorithms in computational geometry.
In this tutorial we will develop a simple algorithm to divide a polygon into a series of triangles. Since this is not a mathematics course we will not deal with the proof of the theorems used. At the end we will develop the code that performs the triangulation.