So, this is exactly what I said I was looking for, but what I actually was thinking was some format what would be efficient for C code to operate on. Having to reach into individual scalars for the 3D coordinates isn't going to be very fast.

I thought it over a bit, and I think what I'm actually wanting is:

• Mesh object:
• 'vertices' attribute, which contains a buffer of packed floats or doubles
• 'polygons' attribute, which contains a buffer of packed integers referencing the vertex numbers of the 3 corners of the polygon
• 'normals' attribute, which contains one vector per vertex, so can be indexed by the polygon integers
• 'textures' attribute, which is an arrayref of hashrefs describing a texture
• 'polygon_texture' attribute, which is a packed integer for each polygon referencing one of the textures and the (S,T) coordinates for each of the 3 referenced vertices, maybe 16-bit ints for the texture coordiantes adding up to 16 bytes per polygon
• A Polygon object that is just a reference to the mesh + an offset, and it loads its attributes on demand.

Maybe the specification for an object like this could be that each of these attributes may be a packed scalar, or a PDL ndarray?

The end-goal I'm trying to achieve is to pass all the buffers to OpenGL and make a shader that can render the whole mesh.

And, I don't know. Maybe this isn't the "perl way" to approach it. Maybe I should start with the inefficient expanded object and have code that packs it however required for the rendering. That adds startup cost though.

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