Consistent Volumetric Discretizations Inside Self-Intersecting Surfaces project page
Alec Jacobson
July 05, 2013
Leo Sacht, Daniele Panozzo, Christian Schüller, Olga Sorkine-Hornung and I have posted a project page for our recently presented SGP paper "Consistent Volumetric Discretizations Inside Self-Intersecting Surfaces". The abstract follows.
Decades of research have culminated in a robust geometry processing pipeline for surfaces. Most steps in this pipeline, like deformation, smoothing, subdivision and decimation, may create self-intersections. Volumetric processing of solid shapes then becomes difficult, because obtaining a correct volumetric discretization is impossible: existing tet-meshing methods require watertight input. We propose an algorithm that produces a tetrahedral mesh that overlaps itself consistently with the self-intersections in the input surface. This enables volumetric processing on self-intersecting models. We leverage conformalized mean-curvature flow, which removes self-intersections, and define an intrinsically similar reverse flow, which prevents them. We tetrahedralize the resulting surface and map the mesh inside the original surface. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with applications to automatic skinning weight computation, physically based simulation and geodesic distance computation.
Here's the youtube video showing a few of the forward and reverse flows.