General 3D offsetting of a triangular net using an implicit function and the distance fields

Abstract

A novel approach which uses the distance fields based on cell subdivision and an implicit surface interpolation based on the radial basis function is proposed in order to get an accurate and error-free offset model of arbitrary shapes composed of a large number of triangle meshes. In the method, the space bounding the original model is divided into smaller cells. For the efficient calculation of distance fields, valid cells which will generate a portion of offset model are selected previously by the proposed detection algorithm. These valid cells are divided again into much smaller voxels which assure required accuracy. At each voxel, the distance fields are created by calculating the minimum distances between the corner points of voxels and the triangle meshes. For the more efficient calculation of distance fields, valid vertices among the triangle meshes which will generate minimum distances with current cell are selected by checking the intersection between current cell and a cone prism generated at each vertex of triangle meshes. In addition, a new approach based on an implicit surface interpolation scheme is proposed to perform two types of offsetting operations including uniform and non-uniform offsetting in the same framework. In the method, a smooth implicit surface is generated from the discrete offset distance values given by the user. After generating the whole distance fields, the offset surface was constructed by using the conventional marching cube algorithm together with mesh smoothing scheme. The effectiveness and validity of this new offset method was demonstrated by performing numerical experiments for the various types of triangle meshes.