Adaptive Mesh Booleans

TL;DR

This paper introduces an adaptive mesh-based method for Boolean operations on triangle meshes that refines intersecting regions, approximates intersection curves, and preserves sharp features, offering flexibility in accuracy and handling open meshes.

Contribution

The proposed approach treats meshes as adaptive surfaces, avoiding exact face intersections, and refines meshes locally to improve efficiency and support features like creases and tolerances.

Findings

Supports open meshes and tolerances

Allows trade-off between speed and accuracy

Preserves sharp features during Boolean operations

Abstract

We present a new method for performing Boolean operations on volumes represented as triangle meshes. In contrast to existing methods which treat meshes as 3D polyhedra and try to partition the faces at their exact intersection curves, we treat meshes as adaptive surfaces which can be arbitrarily refined. Rather than depending on computing precise face intersections, our approach refines the input meshes in the intersection regions, then discards intersecting triangles and fills the resulting holes with high-quality triangles. The original intersection curves are approximated to a user-definable precision, and our method can identify and preserve creases and sharp features. Advantages of our approach include the ability to trade speed for accuracy, support for open meshes, and the ability to incorporate tolerances to handle cases where large numbers of faces are slightly inter-penetrating or near-coincident.