Direct triangulation of 3D surfaces using the advancing front technique

A robust and efficient algorithm for discretization of tensor product polynomial surfaces is presented. The ad vancing front technique operating directly on the surface in the physical space is employed. This avoids difficulties with the anisotropic triangulation of parametric space of these surfaces and also guarantees the creation of well shaped triangles even in case of degenerated or badly parameterized surfaces. However, the parametric space is still used to resolve some intersection checks associated with the edge removal. The mesh gradation is controlled by the octree data structure. Allowing only for one octree level difference of octants sharing an edge too steep size gradation is eliminated and therefore no special strategy for choosing an edge to he removed is to he employed. This leads to the almost linear computational complexity of the proposed algorithm.