A feature‐preserving volumetric technique to merge surface triangulations

Several extensions and improvements to surface merging procedures based on the extraction of iso‐surfaces from a distance map defined on an adaptive background grid are presented. The main objective is to extend the application of these algorithms to surfaces with sharp edges and corners. In order to deal with objects of different length scales, the initial background grids are created using a Delaunay triangulation method and local voxelizations. A point enrichment technique that introduces points into the background grid along detected surface features such as ridges is used to ensure that these features are preserved in the final merged surface. The surface merging methodology is extended to include other Boolean operations between surface triangulations. The iso‐surface extraction algorithms are modified to obtain the correct iso‐surface for multi‐component objects. The procedures are demonstrated with various examples, ranging from simple geometrical entities to complex engineering applications. The present algorithms allow realistic modelling of a large number of complex engineering geometries using overlapping components defined discretely, i.e. via surface triangulations. This capability is very useful for grid generation starting from data originated in measurements or images. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.