High quality compatible triangulations | Engineering with Computers Skip to main content
Log in

High quality compatible triangulations

  • Original Paper
  • Published:
Engineering with Computers Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Compatible meshes are isomorphic meshings of the interiors of two polygons having a correspondence between their vertices. Compatible meshing may be used for constructing sweeps, suitable for finite element analysis, between two base polygons. They may also be used for meshing a given sequence of polygons forming a sweep. We present a method to compute compatible triangulations of planar polygons, sometimes requiring extra (Steiner) vertices. Experimental results show that for typical real-life inputs, the number of Steiner vertices introduced is very small. However, having a small number of Steiner vertices, these compatible triangulations are usually not of high quality, i.e. they do not have well-shaped triangles. We show how to increase the quality of these triangulations by adding Steiner vertices in a compatible manner, using remeshing and mesh smoothing techniques. The total scheme results in high-quality compatible meshes with a small number of triangles. These meshes may then be morphed to obtain the intermediate triangulated sections of a sweep, if needed.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
¥17,985 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Price includes VAT (Japan)

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Fig. 1a–e
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5 a–c
Fig. 6a–d
Fig. 7a–h
Fig. 8a–f
Fig. 9
Fig. 10a, b
Fig. 11a, b
Fig. 12

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Staten ML, Canann SA, Owen SJ (1998) BMSweep: locating interior nodes during sweeping. In: Proceedings of the 7th International Meshing Roundtable, 26–28 October 1998, Dearborn, MI, USA, pp 7–18

  2. Shapira M, Rappoport A (1995) Shape blending using the star-skeleton representation. IEEE Trans Comput Graphics Applic 15(2):44–51

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Sederberg TW, Greenwood E (1992) A physically based approach to 2D shape blending. Comput Graphics (SIGGRAPH ‘92) 26:25–34

    Google Scholar 

  4. Sederberg TW, Gao P, Wang G, Mu H (1993) 2D shape blending: an intrinsic solution to the vertex path problem. Comput Graphics (SIGGRAPH ‘93) 27:15–18

    Google Scholar 

  5. Aronov B, Seidel R, Souvaine DL (1993) On compatible triangulations of simple polygons. Comput Geom Theor Applic 3:27–35

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  6. Gotsman C, Surazhsky V (2001) Guaranteed intersection-free polygon morphing. Comput Graphics 25:67–75

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Kranakis E, Urrutia J (1999) Isomorphic triangulations with small number of Steiner points. Int J Comput Geom Applic 9:171–180

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  8. Gupta H, Wenger R (1997) Constructing piecewise linear homeomorphisms of simple polygons. J Algorithms 22:142–157

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  9. Alexa M, Cohen-Or D, Levin D (2000) As-rigid-as-possible polygon morphing. In: Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2000, 23–28 July 2000, New Orleans, LA, pp 157–164

  10. Blacker T (1996) The Cooper tool. In: Proceedings of the 5th International Meshing Roundtable, 10–11 October 1996, Pittsburgh, PA, pp 13–19

  11. Knupp PM (1998) Next generation sweep tool: a method for generating all-hex meshes and two and one-half dimensional geometries. In: Proceedings of the 7th International Meshing Roundtable, 26–28 October 1998, Dearborn, MI, pp 505–514

  12. Floater MS, Gotsman C (1999) How to morph tilings injectively. Comput Appl Math 101:117–129

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  13. Surazhsky V, Gostman C (2001) Controllable morphing of compatible planar triangulations. ACM Trans Graphics 20:203–231

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Tutte WT (1963) How to draw a graph. Proc Lond Math Soc 13:743–768

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  15. Floater MS (1997) Parameterization and smooth approximation of surface triangulation. Comput Aided Geom Design 14:231–250

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  16. Babikov M, Souvaine DL, Wenger R (1997) Constructing piecewise linear homeomorphisms of polygons with holes. In: Proceedings of the 9th Canadian Conference on Computational geometry, 11–14 August 1997, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, pp 6–10

  17. Suri S (1986) A linear time algorithm for minimum link paths inside a simple polygon. Comput Vis Graph Image Process 35:99–110

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  18. Suri S (1990) On some link distance problems in a simple polygon. IEEE J Robotics Automat 6:108–113

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Zhou T, Shimada K (2000) An angle-based approach to two-dimensional mesh smoothing. In: Proceedings of the 9th International Meshing Roundtable, 2–5 October 2000, New Orleans, LA, pp 373–384

  20. Niederreiter H (1992) Random number generation and quasi-Monte Carlo Methods. SIAM

  21. Canann SA, Tristano JR, Staten ML (1998) An approach to combined Laplacian and optimization-based smoothing for triangular, quadrilateral, and quad dominant meshes. In: Proceedings of the 7th International Meshing Roundtable, 26–28 October 1998, Dearborn, MI, pp 479–496

  22. Parthasarathy V, Kodiyalam S (1991) A constrained optimization approach to finite element mesh smoothing. Finite Elem Anal Design 9:309–320

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  23. Berzins M (1998) Mesh quality: a function of geometry, error estimates or both? In: Proceedings of the 7th International Meshing Roundtable, 26–28 October 1998, Dearborn, MI, pp 229–238

Download references

Acknowledgements

The work was carried out while the authors were at Technion—Israel Institute of Technology. Thanks to Tatiana Surazhsky and Michael Floater for their contribution to the area-based remeshing method, to Alla Sheffer for helpful discussions on sweeps and to Gill Barequet for helpful discussions on the implementation of minimum-link path algorithms. This work was partially supported by the Technion Computer Science Software Technology Laboratory (STL) and the Technion Fund for Promotion of Research.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to V. Surazhsky.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Surazhsky, V., Gotsman, C. High quality compatible triangulations. Engineering with Computers 20, 147–156 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00366-004-0282-6

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00366-004-0282-6

Keywords

Navigation