Direct construction of a four-dimensional mesh model from a three-dimensional object with continuous rigid body movement

In the field of design and manufacturing, there are many problems with managing dynamic states of three-dimensional (3D) objects. In order to solve these problems, the four-dimensional (4D) mesh model and its modeling system have been proposed. The 4D mesh model is defined as a 4D object model that is bounded by tetrahedral cells, and can represent spatio-temporal changes of a 3D object continuously. The 4D mesh model helps to solve dynamic problems of 3D models as geometric problems. However, the construction of the 4D mesh model is limited on the time-series 3D voxel data based method. This method is memory-hogging and requires much computing time. In this research, we propose a new method of constructing the 4D mesh model that derives from the 3D mesh model with continuous rigid body movement. This method is realized by making a swept shape of a 3D mesh model in the fourth dimension and its tetrahe-dralization. Here, the rigid body movement is a screwed movement, which is a combination of translational and rotational movement.