For a computer graphics class. Maybe I'm fundamentally misunderstanding something, but AFAIK the difference between implicit/explicit representations for modelling is just implicit uses equations and explicit just stores the points.
So, how is a polygon mesh an explicit representation of a model when you're only storing information about the vertices and/or edges (depending on what data structure implementation you're using)? For instance, take triangle meshes - you're not explicitly storing information about points that are on the face of a triangle, you just have the vertices and/or edges. In order to do anything meaningful with the points that are on the faces, you'd need to calculate it somehow (with interpolation, etc.). If you're seeing if any random point lies on the surface of the triangle mesh (so not conveniently on a vertex or edge), wouldn't you need to perform an inside/outside test -- which is kind of like an implicit representation?
