title: Particle systems for adaptive, isotropic meshing of CAD models.
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.
authors.affiliation: Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, Salt Lake City, UT, USA.
authors.forename: Jonathan R
authors.initials: JR
authors.lastname: Bronson
authors.forename: Joshua A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Levine
authors.forename: Ross T
authors.initials: RT
authors.lastname: Whitaker