Skeleton-driven Adaptive Hexahedral Meshing of Tubular Shapes

• Published in: Computer graphics forum Vol. 35; no. 7; pp. 237 - 246
• Main Authors: Livesu, Marco, Muntoni, Alessandro, Puppo, Enrico, Scateni, Riccardo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.10.2016
• Subjects: Analysis; Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS); Computer animation; Computer graphics; Finite element method; I.3.5 [Computer Graphics]: Computational Geometry and Object Modeling-Physically based modeling; Image processing systems; Mathematical analysis; Mesh generation; Meshing; Studies; Subdivisions; Topological manifolds; Topology; Tubes
• ISSN: 0167-7055; 1467-8659
• DOI: 10.1111/cgf.13021

We propose a novel method for the automatic generation of structured hexahedral meshes of articulated 3D shapes. We recast the complex problem of generating the connectivity of a hexahedral mesh of a general shape into the simpler problem of generating the connectivity of a tubular structure derived from its curve‐skeleton. We also provide volumetric subdivision schemes to nicely adapt the topology of the mesh to the local thickness of tubes, while regularizing per‐element size. Our method is fast, one‐click, easy to reproduce, and it generates structured meshes that better align to the branching structure of the input shape if compared to previous methods for hexa mesh generation.