Optimizing Corner Assignment of Submap Surfaces

Submapping is a meshing tool for generating structured meshes on non-4-sided surfaces and non-6-sided volumes. An important part of submapping is the assignment of corners in the map to vertices bounding surfaces or edges bounding volumes. In models with fillet, chamfer and round features, corner assignment is difficult, since these features remove discontinuous changes in edge/surface normal, replacing them with features having smooth changes in normal direction. Also required for submapped surfaces and volumes is that corner or edge types bounding a surface or volume sum to four or six, respectively. This paper combines the use of templates to identify surface submapped corners for a variety of common feature types, and the use of an optimization approach to guarantee satisfaction of the sum = 4 − 4 g constraint for submapped surfaces (g is the number of holes). This approach not only works well in the presence of features, but can drastically reduce the user interaction required to set up and mesh models with many features.