Hybrid Base Complex: Extract and Visualize Structure of Hex-Dominant Meshes

Abstract

Hex-dominant mesh generation has received significant attention in recent research due to its superior robustness compared to pure hex-mesh generation techniques. In this work, we introduce the first structure for analyzing hex-dominant meshes. This structure builds on the base complex of pure hex-meshes but incorporates the non-hex elements for a more comprehensive and complete representation. We provide its definition and describe its construction steps. Based on this structure, we present an extraction and categorization of sheets using advanced graph matching techniques to handle the non-hex elements. This enables us to develop an enhanced visual analysis of the structure for any hex-dominant meshes.We apply this structure-based visual analysis to compare hex-dominant meshes generated by different methods to study their advantages and disadvantages. This complements the standard quality metric based on the non-hex element percentage for hex-dominant meshes. Moreover, we propose a strategy to extract a cleaned (optimized) valence-based singularity graph wireframe to analyze the structure for both mesh and sheets. Our results demonstrate that the proposed hybrid base complex provides a coarse representation for mesh element, and the proposed valence singularity graph wireframe provides a better internal visualization of hex-dominant meshes.

Project Components

• Mesh Data Structure for both Hex and Hex-dominant Mesh
• Hybrid Base Complex Extraction Algorithm
• Structure Analysis Algorithm
• Blender Visualization Utilities - tested with Blender 3.6
• Example Codes

ToDo

• Blender Interface
• Support Blender 4.x

Dependences

• tqdm
• pandas
• numpy
• pathlib

Install Packages in Blender 3.x

import pip
pip.main(['install', 'tqdm', '--user'])

Cite

@ARTICLE{si2024hybrid,
  author={Si, Lei and Cao, Haowei and Chen, Guoning},
  journal={IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics}, 
  title={Hybrid Base Complex: Extract and Visualize Structure of Hex-dominant Meshes}, 
  year={2024},
  volume={},
  number={},
  pages={1-12},
  keywords={Visualization;Finite element analysis;Periodic structures;Mesh generation;Faces;Numerical models;Complexity theory;Structure Analysis;Hex-dominant Meshes;Structure Visualization},
  doi={10.1109/TVCG.2024.3372333}}