Skeleton-driven Adaptive Hexahedral Meshing of Tubular Shapes

Abstract

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.