Q-TRAN: A new approach to transform triangular meshes into quadrilateral meshes locally

Abstract

Q-Tran is a new indirect algorithm to transform triangular tessellation of bounded three-dimensional surfaces into all-quadrilateralmeshes. The proposed method is simple, fast and produces quadrilaterals with provably-good quality and hence it does not require a smoothing post-processing step. The method is capable of identifying and recovering structured regions in the input tessellation. The number of generated quadrilaterals tends to be almost the same as the number of the triangles in the input tessellation. Q-Tran preserves the vertices of the input tessellation and hence the geometry is preserved even for highly curved surfaces. Several examples of Q-Tran are presented to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.