How to decide which way to triangulate a quad? Apologies if this is a dumb question... but given four arbitrary (non-coplanar) points in 3D space, there are obviously two different ways to triangulate the quad that they form. One triangulation may produce much more natural results than the other- but how can I determine which one to pick?
Context: I’m doing Dual Contouring, and the quad forms part of an isosurface. I have access to the hermite/gradient data at that point.
A simple heuristic that many 3D content creation apps use is to split along the shorter of the two diagonals of the quad. This generally seems to work pretty well. It minimizes the appearance of long, skinny triangles, which are generally undesirable both for visual and performance reasons.
See this article: Deformation and Triangulation in Maya for some further discussion. In particular if you have a dynamically deforming mesh, you ideally want to retriangulate the quads based on the deformed geometry each frame, or you can get some pretty wonky artifacts if you stick with a fixed triangulation:

(image from the above linked blog post)