HexDom: Polycube-Based Hexahedral-Dominant Mesh Generation

TL;DR

HexDom introduces a semi-automated polycube-based method for generating hex-dominant meshes that include hexahedra, tetrahedra, and prisms, improving mesh quality for complex models.

Contribution

The paper presents HexDom, a novel software extending polycube-based mesh generation to hexahedral-dominant meshes with multiple element types.

Findings

Successfully generates high-quality hex-dominant meshes for complex models.

Demonstrates robustness of HexDom across various test models.

Provides open-source software for practical mesh generation applications.

Abstract

In this paper, we extend our earlier polycube-based all-hexahedral mesh generation method to hexahedral-dominant mesh generation, and present the HexDom software package. Given the boundary representation of a solid model, HexDom creates a hex-dominant mesh by using a semi-automated polycube-based mesh generation method. The resulting hexahedral dominant mesh includes hexahedra, tetrahedra, and triangular prisms. By adding non-hexahedral elements, we are able to generate better quality hexahedral elements than in all-hexahedral meshes. We explain the underlying algorithms in four modules including segmentation, polycube construction, hex-dominant mesh generation and quality improvement, and use a rockerarm model to explain how to run the software. We also apply our software to a number of other complex models to test their robustness. The software package and all tested models are availabe in github (https://github.com/CMU-CBML/HexDom).