Remeshing

Important: Brevity disclaimer.

Intro

Main goal of remeshing algorithms is to improve mesh triangles quality - this is often required in the following cases:

  • Subsequent physics simulation in FEA (Finite Element Analysis) packages.
  • Some triangles quality sensitive algorithm should be executed on the mesh.

There are a lot of different ways to measure triangles quality, but typically for any metric equilateral triangles have maximal quality value while degenerate triangles - the minimal one. Exact metric choice is typically not important for algorithm design.

There are good and well-understood algorithms for 2D triangulations and refinements which can achieve quite high standards of quality, but much less is known for 3D triangulations. In the case there’s good mapping for 3D triangulation to 2D space, it’s possible to use 2D algorithms to improve triangulation quality, but it’s often the case that such kind of mapping is not available or is extremely difficult to produce.

Therefore, in Materialise several algorithms were implemented that tackled the remeshing problem directly in 3D.

Here are some examples of these algorithms execution.

Shark Remeshing

Original Model

Shark original model image

Remeshed Model

Shark remeshed model image

Original model (close up)

Shark original model close upimage

Remeshed model (close up)

Shark remeshed model close up image