Robust Tetrahedral Meshing of Triangle Soups

We propose a novel approach to generate coarse tetrahedral meshes which can be used in interactive simulation frameworks. The proposed algorithm processes unconstrained, i. e. unorientable and nonmanifold triangle soups. Since the volume bounded by an unconstrained surface is not defined, we tetrahedralize the pseudo volume of the surface, namely the space that is intuitively occupied by the surface. Therefore, a new signed distance field approach is employed and a tetrahedral lattice is laid onto the distance field. Elements outside the pseudo volume are discarded and a smoothing filter is applied to the mesh boundary as a postprocessing step. Using our approach, we can generate coarse tetrahedral meshes from damaged surfaces and even triangle soups without any connectivity. Various examples underline the robustness of our approach. The usability of the resulting meshes is illustrated in the context of interactive deformable modeling.