Regridding surface triangulations

An advancing front surface gridding technique that operates on discretely defined surfaces (i.e. triangulations) is presented. Differ ent aspects that are required to make the procedure reliable for complex geometries are discussed. Notable among these are (a) the recovery of surface features and discrete surface patches from the discrete data, (b) filtering based on point and side-normals to remove undesirable data close to cusps and corners, (c) the proper choice of host faces for ridges, and (d) fast interpolation procedures suitable for complex geometries. Post-generation surface recovery or repositioning techniques are discussed. Several examples ranging from academic to industrial demonstrate the utility of the proposed procedure for ab initio surface meshing from discrete data, such as those encountered when the surface description is already given as discrete, the improvement of existing surface triangulations, as well as remeshing applications during runs exhibiting significant change of domain. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.