All-hexahedral mesh generation via inside-out advancing front based on harmonic fields

The generation of hexahedral meshes is an open problem that has undergone significant research. This paper deals with a novel inside-out advancing front method to generate unstructured all-hexahedral meshes for given volumes. Two orthogonal harmonic fields, principal and radial harmonic fields, are generated to guide the inside-out advancing front process based on a few user interactions. Starting from an initial hexahedral mesh inside the given volume, we advance the boundary quadrilateral mesh along the streamlines of radial field and construct layers of hexahedral elements. To ensure high quality and uniform size of the hexahedral mesh, quadrilateral elements are decomposed in such a way that no non-hexahedral element is produced. For complex volume with branch structures, we segment the complex volume into simple sub-volumes that are suitable for our method. Experimental results show that our method generates high quality all-hexahedral meshes for the given volumes.     

Automatic generation of finite element meshes

This paper describes a new algorithm for the automatic generation of finite element meshes of arbitrary multiply connected domains. The strategy is based upon the construction of a mapping from the generated mesh into a regular one. The scheme is designed for maximum flexibility and is able to generate meshes of triangular or quadrilateral curved elements. Several examples are presented to illustrate the applicability of the algorithm.     

A strategy of automatic hexahedral mesh generation by using an improved whisker-weaving method with a surface mesh modification procedure

One of the demands for three dimensional (3D) finite element analyses is the development of an automatic hexahedral mesh generator. For this problem, several methods have been proposed by many researchers. However, reliable automatic hexahedral mesh generation has not been developed at present. In this paper, a new strategy of fully automatic hexahedral mesh generation is proposed. In this strategy, the prerequisite for generating a hexahedral mesh is a quadrilateral surface mesh. From the given surface mesh, combinatorial dual cycles (sheet loops for the whisker-weaving algorithm) are generated to produce a hexahedral mesh. Since generating a good quality hexahedral mesh does not depend only on the quality of quadrilaterals of the surface mesh but also on the quality of the sheet loops generated from it, a surface mesh modification method to remove self-intersections from sheet loops is developed. Next, an automatic hexahedral mesh generator by the improved whisker-weaving algorithm is developed in this paper. By creating elements and nodes on 3D real space during the weaving process, it becomes possible to generate a hexahedral mesh with fewer bad-quality elements. Several examples will be presented to show the validity of the proposed mesh generation strategy.     

Generation of bi-monotone patches from quadrilateral mesh for reverse engineering

Thanks to recent improvements, computational methods can now be used to convert triangular meshes into quadrilateral meshes so that the quadrilateral elements capture well the principal curvature directional fields of surfaces and intrinsically have surface parametric values. In this study, a quadrilateral mesh generated using the mixed integer quadrangulation technique of Bommes et al. is used for input. We first segment a quadrilateral mesh into four-sided patches. The feature curves inside these patches are then detected and are constrained to act as the patch boundaries. Finally, the patch configuration is improved to generate large patches. The proposed method produces bi-monotone patches, which are appropriate for use in reverse engineering to capture the surface details of an object. A shape control parameter that can be adjusted by the user during the patch generation process is also provided to support the creation of patches with good bi-monotone shapes. This study mainly targets shape models of mechanical parts consisting of major smooth surfaces with feature curves between them.     

Template-based quadrilateral mesh generation from imaging data

This paper describes a novel template-based meshing approach for generating good quality quadrilateral meshes from 2D digital images. This approach builds upon an existing image-based mesh generation technique called Imeshp, which enables us to create a segmented triangle mesh from an image without the need for an image segmentation step. Our approach generates a quadrilateral mesh using an indirect scheme, which converts the segmented triangle mesh created by the initial steps of the Imesh technique into a quadrilateral one. The triangle-to-quadrilateral conversion makes use of template meshes of triangles. To ensure good element quality, the conversion step is followed by a smoothing step, which is based on a new optimization-based procedure. We show several examples of meshes generated by our approach, and present a thorough experimental evaluation of the quality of the meshes given as examples.     

Quad‐Mesh Generation and Processing: A Survey

Triangle meshes have been nearly ubiquitous in computer graphics, and a large body of data structures and geometry processing algorithms based on them has been developed in the literature. At the same time, quadrilateral meshes, especially semi‐regular ones, have advantages for many applications, and significant progress was made in quadrilateral mesh generation and processing during the last several years. In this survey we discuss the advantages and problems of techniques operating on quadrilateral meshes, including surface analysis and mesh quality, simplification, adaptive refinement, alignment with features, parametrisation and remeshing.     

Retiling scheme: a novel approach of direct anisotropic quad-dominant remeshing

Remeshing has been an active research topic in Digital Geometry Processing. In this paper, a novel approach of direct anisotropic quad-dominant remeshing is proposed. We apply the retiling method to the particular problem of quad-dominant remeshing. Compared with other methods, this method can simply partition the surface of an original triangular mesh into connected quads with the mesh edges aligning to the principal directions. The first step in this method is to estimate and smooth the curvature tensor field of the surface at the vertices, and then the quad-dominant mesh is obtained by retiling the quad surface so that quadrilateral edges are parallel to the local principal curvature directions. In addition, to preserve the sharp feature information during remeshing processes, the feature lines can be extracted using mesh segmentation method, and the intersections between the feature lines and the orthogonal planes can be found during the process of retiling. A feature fusion process is presented to join the feature edges and feature points into the quad-dominant mesh. The experiment results show that this new remeshing method is simple and easy to implement. The resolution of the quadrilateral mesh can be controlled during the remeshing. It is applicable to arbitrary genus meshes and can generate high-quality quad-dominant mesh.     

边界简化与多目标优化相结合的高质量四边形网格生成

目的 高质量四边形网格生成是计算机辅助设计、等几何分析与图形学领域中一个富有挑战性的重要问题。针对这一问题,提出一种基于边界简化与多目标优化的高质量四边形网格生成新框架。方法 首先针对亏格非零的平面区域,提出一种将多连通区域转化为单连通区域的方法,可生成高质量的插入边界;其次,提出"可简化角度"和"可简化面积比率"两个阈值概念,从顶点夹角和顶点三角形面积入手,将给定的多边形边界简化为粗糙多边形;然后对边界简化得到的粗糙多边形进行子域分解,并确定每个子域内的网格顶点连接信息;最后提出四边形网格的均匀性和正交性度量目标函数,并通过多目标非线性优化技术确定网格内部顶点的几何位置。结果 在同样的离散边界下,本文方法与现有方法所生成的四边网格相比,所生成的四边网格顶点和单元总数目较少,网格单元质量基本类似,计算时间成本大致相同,但奇异点数目可减少70% 80%,衡量网格单元质量的比例雅克比值等相关指标均有所提高。结论 本文所提出的四边形网格生成方法能够有效减少网格中的奇异点数目,并可生成具有良好光滑性、均匀性和正交性的高质量四边形网格,非常适用于工程分析和动画仿真。     

Generic remeshing of 3D triangular meshes with metric-dependent discrete voronoi diagrams

In this paper, we propose a generic framework for 3D surface remeshing. Based on a metric-driven Discrete Voronoi Diagram construction, our output is an optimized 3D triangular mesh with a user defined vertex budget. Our approach can deal with a wide range of applications, from high quality mesh generation to shape approximation. By using appropriate metric constraints the method generates isotropic or anisotropic elements. Based on point-sampling, our algorithm combines the robustness and theoretical strength of Delaunay criteria with the efficiency of entirely discrete geometry processing . Besides the general described framework, we show experimental results using isotropic, quadric-enhanced isotropic and anisotropic metrics which prove the efficiency of our method on large meshes, for a low computational cost.     

The receding front method applied to hexahedral mesh generation of exterior domains

Two of the most successful methods to generate unstructured hexahedral meshes are the grid-based methods and the advancing front methods. On the one hand, the grid-based methods generate high-quality hexahedra in the inner part of the domain using an inside–outside approach. On the other hand, advancing front methods generate high-quality hexahedra near the boundary using an outside–inside approach. To combine the advantages of both methodologies, we extend the receding front method: an inside–outside mesh generation approach by means of a reversed advancing front. We apply this approach to generate unstructured hexahedral meshes of exterior domains. To reproduce the shape of the boundaries, we first pre-compute the mesh fronts by combining two solutions of the Eikonal equation on a tetrahedral reference mesh. Then, to generate high-quality elements, we expand the quadrilateral surface mesh of the inner body towards the unmeshed external boundary using the pre-computed fronts as a guide.     

Motorcycle graph enumeration from quadrilateral meshes for reverse engineering

Recently proposed quad-meshing techniques allow the generation of high-quality semi-regular quadrilateral meshes. This paper outlines the generation of quadrilateral segments using such meshes. Quadrilateral segments are advantageous in reverse engineering because they do not require surface trimming or surface parameterization. The motorcycle graph algorithm of Eppstein et al. produces the motorcycle graph of a given quadrilateral mesh consisting of quadrilateral segments. These graphs are preferable to base complexes, because the mesh can be represented with a smaller number of segments, as T-joints (where the intersection of two neighboring segments does not involve the whole edge or the vertex) are allowed in quadrilateral segmentation.The proposed approach in this study enumerates all motorcycle graphs of a given quadrilateral mesh and optimum graph for reverse engineering is then selected. Due to the high computational cost of enumerating all these graphs, the mesh is cut into several sub-meshes whose motorcycle graphs are enumerated separately. The optimum graph is then selected based on a cost function that produces low values for graphs whose edges trace a large number of highly curved regions in the model. By applying several successive enumeration steps for each sub-mesh, a motorcycle graph for the given mesh is found. We also outline a method for the extraction of feature curves (sets of highly curved edges) and their integration into the proposed algorithm. Quadrilateral segments generated using the proposed techniques are validated by B-spline surfaces.     

快速收敛的四边形网格三分细分模式

提出了四边形网格的三分细分模式.对于正则和非正则四边形网格,分别采用不同的细分模板获得新的细分顶点.从双三次B样条中推导出正则四边形网格的三分细分模板,极限曲面C²连续;对细分矩阵进行傅里叶变换,推导出非正则四边形网格的三分细分模板,极限曲面C¹连续.提出的三分细分模式可以解决任意拓扑四边形网格的曲面细分问题.与其他细分模式相比,具有收敛速度快、适用范围广等优点.最后给出了四边形网格细分的实例.     

一种用于自动生成二维全四边形有限元网格的改进的铺设算法

本文所述改进算法删除了原有算法的诸多繁琐之处,改进了原有算法的许多不足,并加入了一些新的算法规则。实例测试结果表明,用本文所述改进算法生产的四边形网格具有网格分布均匀,四格四边形接近于规则四边等特点。     

Global Structure Optimization of Quadrilateral Meshes

We introduce a fully automatic algorithm which optimizes the high‐level structure of a given quadrilateral mesh to achieve a coarser quadrangular base complex. Such a topological optimization is highly desirable, since state‐of‐the‐art quadrangulation techniques lead to meshes which have an appropriate singularity distribution and an anisotropic element alignment, but usually they are still far away from the high‐level structure which is typical for carefully designed meshes manually created by specialists and used e.g. in animation or simulation. In this paper we show that the quality of the high‐level structure is negatively affected by helical configurations within the quadrilateral mesh. Consequently we present an algorithm which detects helices and is able to remove most of them by applying a novel grid preserving simplification operator (GP‐operator) which is guaranteed to maintain an all‐quadrilateral mesh. Additionally it preserves the given singularity distribution and in particular does not introduce new singularities. For each helix we construct a directed graph in which cycles through the start vertex encode operations to remove the corresponding helix. Therefore a simple graph search algorithm can be performed iteratively to remove as many helices as possible and thus improve the high‐level structure in a greedy fashion. We demonstrate the usefulness of our automatic structure optimization technique by showing several examples with varying complexity.     

Adaptive Skin Meshes Coarsening for Biomolecular Simulation

In this paper, we present efficient algorithms for generating hierarchical molecular skin meshes with decreasing size and guaranteed quality. Our algorithms generate a sequence of coarse meshes for both the surfaces and the bounded volumes. Each coarser surface mesh is adaptive to the surface curvature and maintains the topology of the skin surface with guaranteed mesh quality. The corresponding tetrahedral mesh is conforming to the interface surface mesh and contains high quality tetrahedra that decompose both the interior of the molecule and the surrounding region (enclosed in a sphere). Our hierarchical tetrahedral meshes have a number of advantages that will facilitate fast and accurate multigrid PDE solvers. Firstly, the quality of both the surface triangulations and tetrahedral meshes is guaranteed. Secondly, the interface in the tetrahedral mesh is an accurate approximation of the molecular boundary. In particular, all the boundary points lie on the skin surface. Thirdly, our meshes are Delaunay meshes. Finally, the meshes are adaptive to the geometry.     

Generation of anisotropic mesh by ellipse packing over an unbounded domain

With the advance of the finite element method, general fluid dynamic and traffic flow problems with arbitrary boundary definition over an unbounded domain are tackled. This paper describes an algorithm for the generation of anisotropic mesh of variable element size over an unbounded 2D domain by using the advancing front ellipse packing technique. Unlike the conventional frontal method, the procedure does not start from the object boundary but starts from a convenient point within an open domain. The sequence of construction of the packing ellipses is determined by the shortest distance from the fictitious centre in such a way that the generation front is more or less a circular loop with occasional minor concave parts due to element size variation. As soon as an ellipse is added to the generation front, finite elements are directly generated by properly connecting frontal segments with the centre of the new ellipse. Ellipses are packed closely and in contact with the existing ellipses by an iterative procedure according to the specified anisotropic metric tensor. The anisotropic meshes generated by ellipse packing can also be used through a mapping process to produce parametric surface meshes of various characteristics. The size and the orientation of the ellipses in the pack are controlled by the metric tensor as derived from the principal surface curvatures. In contrast to other mesh generation schemes, the domain boundary is not considered in the process of ellipse packing, this reduces a lot of geometrical checks for intersection between frontal segments. Five examples are given to show the effectiveness and robustness of anisotropic mesh generation and the application of ellipse packing to mesh generation over various curved surfaces.     

极大熵条件下的动态搜索优化图象重建方法

提出一种满足多种准则的动态搜索优化图象重建方法。从图象场的本质出发，设立了３个准则函数。熵函数的导数是非线性的，本文将其变换为近似的线性公式以获得迭代公路。动态搜索则尽可能避免很多算法在迭代过程中对图象校正过量或不足的问题。     

An anisotropic unstructured triangular adaptive mesh algorithm based on error and error gradient information

In this paper, an algorithm based on unstructured triangular meshes using standard refinement patterns for anisotropic adaptive meshes is presented. It consists of three main actions: anisotropic refinement, solution-weighted smoothing and patch unrefinement. Moreover, a hierarchical mesh formulation is used. The main idea is to use the error and error gradient on each mesh element to locally control the anisotropy of the mesh. The proposed algorithm is tested on interpolation and boundary-value problems with a discontinuous solution.     

Comparison of the meccano method with standard mesh generation techniques

The meccano method is a novel and promising mesh generation technique for simultaneously creating adaptive tetrahedral meshes and volume parameterizations of a complex solid. The method combines several former procedures: a mapping from the meccano boundary to the solid surface, a 3-D local refinement algorithm and a simultaneous mesh untangling and smoothing. In this paper we present the main advantages of our method against other standard mesh generation techniques. We show that our method constructs meshes that can be locally refined using the Kossaczky bisection rule and maintaining a high mesh quality. Finally, we generate volume T-mesh for isogeometric analysis, based on the volume parameterization obtained by the method.     

Progressive Interpolation based on Catmull‐Clark Subdivision Surfaces

We introduce a scheme for constructing a Catmull‐Clark subdivision surface that interpolates the vertices of a quadrilateral mesh with arbitrary topology. The basic idea here is to progressively modify the vertices of an original mesh to generate a new control mesh whose limit surface interpolates all vertices in the original mesh. The scheme is applicable to meshes with any size and any topology, and it has the advantages of both a local scheme and a global scheme.