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Particle systems for adaptive, isotropic meshing of CAD models

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Abstract

We present a particle-based approach for generating adaptive triangular surface and tetrahedral volume meshes from computer-aided design models. Input shapes are treated as a collection of smooth, parametric surface patches that can meet non-smoothly on boundaries. Our approach uses a hierarchical sampling scheme that places particles on features in order of increasing dimensionality. These particles reach a good distribution by minimizing an energy computed in 3D world space, with movements occurring in the parametric space of each surface patch. Rather than using a pre-computed measure of feature size, our system automatically adapts to both curvature as well as a notion of topological separation. It also enforces a measure of smoothness on these constraints to construct a sizing field that acts as a proxy to piecewise-smooth feature size. We evaluate our technique with comparisons against other popular triangular meshing techniques for this domain.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by NIH/NIGMS Center for Integrative Biomedical Computing, 2P41-RR0112553-12.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, Salt Lake City, UT, USA

    Jonathan R. Bronson, Joshua A. Levine & Ross T. Whitaker

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  1. Jonathan R. Bronson
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  2. Joshua A. Levine
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  3. Ross T. Whitaker
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Correspondence to Jonathan R. Bronson.

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Bronson, J.R., Levine, J.A. & Whitaker, R.T. Particle systems for adaptive, isotropic meshing of CAD models. Engineering with Computers 28, 331–344 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00366-012-0266-x

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