Automatic feature-preserving size field for three-dimensional mesh generation

This article presents a methodology aiming at easing considerably the generation of high-quality meshes for complex three-dimensional (3D) domains. To this end, a mesh size field h(x) is computed, taking surface curvatures and geometric features into account. The size field is tuned by five intuitive parameters and yields quality meshes for arbitrary geometries. Mesh size is initialized on a surface triangulation of the domain based on discrete curvatures and medial axis transform computations. It is then propagated into the volume while ensuring the size gradient ∇h is controlled so as to obtain a smoothly graded mesh. As the size field is stored in an independent octree data structure, it can be computed separately, then plugged into any mesh generator able to respect a prescribed size field. The procedure is automatic, in the sense that minimal interaction with the user is required. Applications of our methodology on CAD models taken from the very large ABC dataset are presented. In particular, all presented meshes were obtained with the same generic set of parameters, demonstrating the universality of the technique.