Meshing volumes bounded by smooth surfaces

Abstract

This paper introduces a three-dimensional mesh generation algorithm for domains bounded by smooth surfaces. The algorithm combines a Delaunay-based surface mesher with a Ruppert-like volume mesher, to get a greedy algorithm that samples the interior and the boundary of the domain at once. The algorithm constructs provably-good meshes, it gives control on the size of the mesh elements through a user-defined sizing field, and it guarantees the accuracy of the approximation of the domain boundary. A noticeable feature is that the domain boundary has to be known only through an oracle that can tell whether a given point lies inside the object and whether a given line segment intersects the boundary. This makes the algorithm generic enough to be applied to a wide variety of objects, ranging from domains defined by implicit surfaces to domains defined by level-sets in 3D grey-scaled images or by point-set surfaces. © 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.