The adaptive thin shell tetrahedral mesh

Abstract

Tetrahedral meshes are often used for simulating deformable objects. Unlike engineering disciplines that often focuses on accuracy, computer graphics is biased towards stable, robust, and fast methods. In that spirit we present an approach for building an adaptive inward shell of the surface of an object. The goal is to device a simple and fast algorithm capable of building a topologically consistent tetrahedral mesh. The tetrahedral mesh can be used with several different simulation method, such as the finite element method (FEM), and the main contribution of this paper is a novel tetrahedral mesh generation method based on adaptive surface extrusion.