   how to tell if 5 points lie on the same plane?
  OK so i'm trying to make a dodecahedron. i have the vertices's for them but i don't know how to make out of triangles correctly. i figured that if i could find  12 sets of coplanar points that those planes would would be my pentagons and i could then either divi each pentagon up into three triangles or just use the pentagon deal instead of three triangles. but the problem remains, one is my thinking correct, and two (if i am right) how do i do it.   
  I'm not sure if your thinking is correct but to be able to tell if 5 points lie on the same plane isn't too difficult luckily!Take any 3 of your 5 points, lets call them points A,B and C.Next, make 2 vectors... one from A to B and one from A to C, let's call these AB and AC.Next up, take the cross product of the vectors AB and AC to get a third vector that is perpendicular to those 2 vectors.  This is the normal of the plane formed by these 3 points.Store this normal.Next up, take one of the origional points, and the other 2 points that so far haven't been used and lets call these points A, B and C again.Get vectors AB and AC from these new points and do a cross product again.If the result of that cross product is the same as the first time around, all 5 points are on the same plane.CAVEATS!ok, so thats the simplified explanation but there's 2 issues you need to worry about.#1 - due to floating point imprecision, instead of checking if the 2 normals are equal, you should check if they are CLOSE to equal within some level of tolerance (up to you to decide how much)#2 - you dont know what order the points are in spatially, so the normal you calculate with the cross product may be pointing the wrong direction.  So, instead of just checking if the 2 normals match, also check if they are oppositely pointed from eachother.  If they are, that should also be considered a match.HTH!   ;  wow thanks, im about 90% pleased but two things (srry most of the math involved in this has not been thought to me i thought it to my self)one, when you say vector you mean like same thing as spherical coordinate's, example: (r,theta,that wired little squiggly) or do you mean something else i have not learned and two explain what you mean by cross product (it sounds simple enough but i don't know exactly what you mean)   ;  By vector i just mean this...To get a vector from point A to point B, just subtract point A from point B.That will give you a set of X,Y,Z values, and that is your vector.As far as cross product, here's an explanation:http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article1089.aspand for more help on vector math (you should learn it... dot product, cross product, vector projection and matrix math are the basic math syou should know for game programming), check out this page:http://chortle.ccsu.edu/VectorLessons/vectorIndex.html   ;  super thanks!!!! i hope it works (other wise i will be back shortly lol)   ;  Hey follow up question for you!How are you getting the points, are you calculating them or what?   