44 research outputs found
Frame Fields for Hexahedral Mesh Generation
As a discretized representation of the volumetric domain, hexahedral meshes have been a popular choice in computational engineering science and serve as one of the main mesh types in leading industrial software of relevance. The generation of high quality hexahedral meshes is extremely challenging because it is essentially an optimization problem involving multiple (conflicting) objectives, such as fidelity, element quality, and structural regularity. Various hexahedral meshing methods have been proposed in past decades, attempting to solve the problem from different perspectives. Unfortunately, algorithmic hexahedral meshing with guarantees of robustness and quality remains unsolved.
The frame field based hexahedral meshing method is the most promising approach that is capable of automatically generating hexahedral meshes of high quality, but unfortunately, it suffers from several robustness issues. Field based hexahedral meshing follows the idea of integer-grid maps, which pull back the Cartesian hexahedral grid formed by integer isoplanes from a parametric domain to a surface-conforming hexahedral mesh of the input object. Since directly optimizing for a high quality integer-grid map is mathematically challenging, the construction is usually split into two steps: (1) generation of a feature-aligned frame field and (2) generation of an integer-grid map that best aligns with the frame field. The main robustness issue stems from the fact that smooth frame fields frequently exhibit singularity graphs that are inappropriate for hexahedral meshing and induce heavily degenerate integer-grid maps. The thesis aims at analyzing the gap between the topologies of frame fields and hexahedral meshes and developing algorithms to realize a more robust field based hexahedral mesh generation.
The first contribution of this work is an enumeration of all local configurations that exist in hexahedral meshes with bounded edge valence and a generalization of the Hopf-Poincaré formula to octahedral (orthonormal frame) fields, leading to necessary local and global conditions for the hex-meshability of an octahedral field in terms of its singularity graph. The second contribution is a novel algorithm to generate octahedral fields with prescribed hex-meshable singularity graphs, which requires the solution of a large non-linear mixed-integer algebraic system. This algorithm is an important step toward robust automatic hexahedral meshing since it enables the generation of a hex-meshable octahedral field.
In the collaboration work with colleagues [BRK+22], the dataset HexMe consisting of practically relevant models with feature tags is set up, allowing a fair evaluation for practical hexahedral mesh generation algorithms. The extendable and mutable dataset remains valuable as hexahedral meshing algorithms develop. The results of the standard field based hexahedral meshing algorithms on the HexMesh dataset expose the fragility of the automatic pipeline.
The major contribution of this thesis improves the robustness of the automatic field based hexahedral meshing by guaranteeing local meshability of general feature aligned smooth frame fields. We derive conditions on the meshability of frame fields when feature constraints are considered, and describe an algorithm to automatically turn a given non-meshable frame field into a similar but locally meshable one. Despite the fact that local meshability is only a necessary but not sufficient condition for the stronger requirement of meshability, our algorithm increases the 2% success rate of generating valid integer-grid maps with state-of-the-art methods to 57%, when compared on the challenging HexMe dataset
HybridOctree_Hex: Hybrid Octree-Based Adaptive All-Hexahedral Mesh Generation with Jacobian Control
We present a new software package, "HybridOctree_Hex," for adaptive
all-hexahedral mesh generation based on hybrid octree and quality improvement
with Jacobian control. The proposed HybridOctree_Hex begins by detecting
curvatures and narrow regions of the input boundary to identify key surface
features and initialize an octree structure. Subsequently, a strongly balanced
octree is constructed using the balancing and pairing rules. Inspired by our
earlier preliminary hybrid octree-based work, templates are designed to
guarantee an all-hexahedral dual mesh generation directly from the strongly
balanced octree. With these pre-defined templates, the sophisticated hybrid
octree construction step is skipped to achieve an efficient implementation.
After that, elements outside and around the boundary are removed to create a
core mesh. The boundary points of the core mesh are connected to their
corresponding closest points on the surface to fill the buffer zone and build
the final mesh. Coupled with smart Laplacian smoothing, HybridOctree_Hex takes
advantage of a delicate optimization-based quality improvement method
considering geometric fitting, Jacobian and scaled Jacobian, to achieve a
minimum scaled Jacobian that is higher than . We empirically verify the
robustness and efficiency of our method by running the HybridOctree_Hex
software on dozens of complex 3D models without any manual intervention or
parameter adjustment. We provide the HybridOctree_Hex source code, along with
comprehensive results encompassing the input and output files and statistical
data in the following repository: https://github.com/CMU-CBML/HybridOctree_Hex
Synthesis of Frame Field-Aligned Multi-Laminar Structures
In the field of topology optimization, the homogenization approach has been
revived as an important alternative to the established, density-based methods
because it can represent the microstructural design at a much finer
length-scale than the computational grid. The optimal microstructure for a
single load case is an orthogonal rank-3 laminate. A rank-3 laminate can be
described in terms of frame fields, which are also an important tool for mesh
generation in both 2D and 3D.
We propose a method for generating multi-laminar structures from frame
fields. Rather than relying on integrative approaches that find a
parametrization based on the frame field, we find stream surfaces, represented
as point clouds aligned with frame vectors, and we solve an optimization
problem to find well-spaced collections of such stream surfaces. The stream
surface tracing is unaffected by the presence of singularities outside the
region of interest. Neither stream surface tracing nor selecting well-spaced
surface rely on combed frame fields.
In addition to stream surface tracing and selection, we provide two methods
for generating structures from stream surface collections. One of these methods
produces volumetric solids by summing basis functions associated with each
point of the stream surface collection. The other method reinterprets point
sampled stream surfaces as a spatial twist continuum and produces a
hexahedralization by dualizing a graph representing the structure.
We demonstrate our methods on several frame fields produced using the
homogenization approach for topology optimization, boundary-aligned, algebraic
frame fields, and frame fields computed from closed-form expressions.Comment: 19 pages, 18 figure
At-Most-Hexa Meshes
AbstractVolumetric polyhedral meshes are required in many applications, especially for solving partial differential equations on finite element simulations. Still, their construction bears several additional challenges compared to boundaryâbased representations. Tetrahedral meshes and (pure) hexâmeshes are two popular formats in scenarios like CAD applications, offering opposite advantages and disadvantages. Hexâmeshes are more intricate to construct due to the global structure of the meshing, but feature much better regularity, alignment, are more expressive, and offer the same simulation accuracy with fewer elements. Hexâdominant meshes, where most but not all cell elements have a hexahedral structure, constitute an attractive compromise, potentially unlocking benefits from both structures, but their generality makes their employment in downstream applications difficult. In this work, we introduce a strict subset of general hexâdominant meshes, which we term 'atâmostâhexa meshes', in which most cells are still hexahedral, but no cell has more than six boundary faces, and no face has more than four sides. We exemplify the ease of construction of atâmostâhexa meshes by proposing a frugal and straightforward method to generate highâquality meshes of this kind, starting directly from hulls or point clouds, for example, from a 3D scan. In contrast to existing methods for (pure) hexahedral meshing, ours does not require an intermediate parameterization of other costly preâcomputations and can start directly from surfaces or samples. We leverage a Lloyd relaxation process to exploit the synergistic effects of aligning an orientation field in a modified 3D Voronoi diagram using the norm for cubical cells. The extracted geometry incorporates regularity as well as feature alignment, following sharp edges and curved boundary surfaces. We introduce specialized operations on the threeâdimensional graph structure to enforce consistency during the relaxation. The resulting algorithm allows for an efficient evaluation with parallel algorithms on GPU hardware and completes even large reconstructions within minutes
Finding Hexahedrizations for Small Quadrangulations of the Sphere
This paper tackles the challenging problem of constrained hexahedral meshing.
An algorithm is introduced to build combinatorial hexahedral meshes whose
boundary facets exactly match a given quadrangulation of the topological
sphere. This algorithm is the first practical solution to the problem. It is
able to compute small hexahedral meshes of quadrangulations for which the
previously known best solutions could only be built by hand or contained
thousands of hexahedra. These challenging quadrangulations include the
boundaries of transition templates that are critical for the success of general
hexahedral meshing algorithms.
The algorithm proposed in this paper is dedicated to building combinatorial
hexahedral meshes of small quadrangulations and ignores the geometrical
problem. The key idea of the method is to exploit the equivalence between quad
flips in the boundary and the insertion of hexahedra glued to this boundary.
The tree of all sequences of flipping operations is explored, searching for a
path that transforms the input quadrangulation Q into a new quadrangulation for
which a hexahedral mesh is known. When a small hexahedral mesh exists, a
sequence transforming Q into the boundary of a cube is found; otherwise, a set
of pre-computed hexahedral meshes is used.
A novel approach to deal with the large number of problem symmetries is
proposed. Combined with an efficient backtracking search, it allows small
shellable hexahedral meshes to be found for all even quadrangulations with up
to 20 quadrangles. All 54,943 such quadrangulations were meshed using no more
than 72 hexahedra. This algorithm is also used to find a construction to fill
arbitrary domains, thereby proving that any ball-shaped domain bounded by n
quadrangles can be meshed with no more than 78 n hexahedra. This very
significantly lowers the previous upper bound of 5396 n.Comment: Accepted for SIGGRAPH 201