Developer's Desktop - Spring 2009

3D Mesh – When Facets Aren’t Enough

The ACIS faceter is familiar to most of our customers and meets most visualization and analysis needs. But what happens when you have particular meshing needs that the faceter can’t meet – like needing a volumetric mesh? For these applications, 3D Mesh offers a high level of control over surface and volume meshing.

3D Mesh works hand in hand with ACIS to specify, generate, refine, and query meshing elements and nodes. The ACIS faceter provides an initial seed mesh which can then be modified by 3D Mesh based on the settings you choose. Upon review of the new mesh, you can select areas of the mesh for greater refinement and regenerate the mesh. You can also query the mesh for not only its node and element information, but also the associativity between elements and the ACIS entities that they lie on (points, faces, and edges).

Types of meshes provided include triangular or quad element surface meshes, and tetrahedral volume meshes. 3D Mesh has options to control the meshing, including (but not limited to):

• Desired edge length
• Minimum edge length
• Maximum growth rate
• Maximum spanning angle
• Mesh order (linear or parabolic)

To make working with 3D Mesh easier, Spatial includes the VA Bridge. The bridge offers a simple, easy to use interface between ACIS and 3D Mesh, with the most common options and functions available. It also includes the HVA Bridge which simplifies the display of generated meshes with HOOPS, and connecting HOOPS segments back to mesh elements. Both bridges offer Scheme and C++ interfaces and make implementing 3D Mesh straightforward for an ACIS application.

Authored by Erik Hultgren

Learn More about 3D Mesh

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