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SurfaceMeshingFilters

Surface Mesh Definitions

Creating a surface mesh in DREAM3D can be accomplished in several ways. There are a pair of filters Multi-Material Marching Cubes (Slice at a Time) and Quick Surface Mesh that will generate a triangular based mesh of the primary Feature for you. The terminology of the underlying data structures is something that the user should understand so that they can be well informed. We start out by defining a triangle T which we will call a Face. Each Triangle has 3 Vertex (V0, V1, V2) which are referred to as a Point, Vertex and/or Node interchangeably within DREAM3D.

Triangle or Face @image latex TriangleSmall.png " " width=3in

These data structures are declared in DREAM3D in the following code:

typedef struct
{
    Float_t pos[3];
} Vert_t;

typedef struct
{
    signed int verts[3];
} Face_t;

DREAM3D stores all the vertices in a single array. DREAM3D has the notion of a "shared vertex list" where each vertex is only listed once in the vertex list. Each Triangle is then created by referencing 3 indexes out of the vertex list to form the 3 points of the triangle.

Vertex & Triangle Attributes

DREAM3D filters can attach attributes to each vertex or triangle. These attributes can be scalar or vector of any numerical type. Some attributes are dependent on the winding of the triangle. From OpenGL the normal is computed via a right-hand-rule and so proper triangle winding is important when visualizing the mesh and also is important to some filters such as the Grain Face Curvature Filter. This is why there are filters such as Reverse Triangle Winding and Verify Triangle Winding in order to ensure proper winding and normal calculations.

Surface Mesh Data Container

To support the creation and manipulation of a surface mesh DREAM3D introduced a new data container type called the SurfaceMeshDataContainer and have as its core properties the shared vertex array and triangle array. These arrays have default names given to them which are defined in DREAM3DLib/Common/Constants.h

const std::string SurfaceMeshNodes("SurfaceMeshNodes");
const std::string SurfaceMeshTriangles("SurfaceMeshTriangles");

In the filter documentation the following terminology will be used:

  • Vertex Array: Refers to the shared vertex array stored in the SurfaceMeshDataContainer
  • Triangle Array: Refers to the triangle array stored in the SurfaceMeshDataContainer
  • Edge Array: Refers to the edge array stored in the SurfaceMeshDataContainer

Edge Data

Update with algorithm to generate Unique Edge Ids

Filter List