Surface mesh generation for surface models by 2D conforming Delaunay triangulation

An approach to the generation of unstructured surface meshes for surface models was presented. The only assumption is that each patch of input surface model can be treated as a single-valued function by properly specifying the projection plane. To mesh a patch of the surface model, 2D conforming Delaunay triangulation was employed on the corresponding projection plane followed by interpolating the vertices of mesh. Because of adopting cooperate-triangulation strategy, the generated surface mesh was matched at common boundary although the mesh of each patch was generated separately. Compared with advancing-front method, boundary discretization need not to be performed in advanced, the same effect was achieved when the boundary is recovered by means of boundary subdivision scheme in the conforming Delaunay triangulation procedure. By assigning element size distribution function reasonably in conforming Delaunay triangulation procedure, the generated surface mesh was a nice approximation of the underlying surface model, and self-adaptive surface mesh can be achieved. The capability of the method is demonstrated for several 3D surface models.