Cut-enhanced PolyCube-Maps for Feature-aware All-Hex Meshing

Hao-Xiang Guo 12    Xiaohan Liu 23    Dong-Ming Yan 3    Yang Liu 2 1 Tsinghua University    2 Microsoft Research Asia    3 University of Chinese Academy of Sciences ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2020)

Abstract

Volumetric PolyCube-Map-based methods offer automatic ways to construct all-hexahedral meshes for closed 3D polyhedral domains, but their meshing quality is limited by the lack of interior singularities and feature alignment. In the presented work, we propose cut-enhanced PolyCube-Maps, to introduce essential interior singularities and preserve most input features. Our main idea is simple and intuitive: by inserting proper parametrization seams into the initial PolyCube-Map via novel PolyCube cutting operations, the mapping distortion can be reduced significantly. The cut-enhanced PolyCube-Map computation includes feature-aware PolyCube-Map construction and cut-enhanced PolyCube deformation. The former aims to preserve input feature edges during the initial PolyCube-map construction. The latter introduces seams into the volumetric PolyCube shape by cutting it through selective PolyCube edges and deforms the modified PolyCube under the seamless constraints to compute a low-distortion PolyCube-Map. The hexahedral mesh induced by the final PolyCube-Map can be further enhanced by our mesh improvement algorithm.
We validate the efficacy of our method on a collection of hundred CAD models and demonstrate its advantages over other automatic all-hex meshing methods and padding strategies. The limitations of cut-enhanced PolyCube-Maps are also discussed thoroughly.

	Paper [PDF] Appendix [ZIP] Slides [PPTX] Code [Github] Citation [BibTeX] Hao-Xiang Guo, Xiaohan Liu, Dong-Ming Yan, and Yang Liu. 2020. Cut-enhanced PolyCube-Maps for Feature-aware All-Hex Meshing. ACM Trans. Graph. 39, 4, Article 106 (2020), 14 pages.