arXiv subjects

Pierre-Alexandre Beaufort

Publications and source records attributed to Pierre-Alexandre Beaufort.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2021

Hex Me If You Can

HEXME consists of tetrahedral meshes with tagged features, and of a workflow to generate them. The main purpose of HEXME meshes is to enable consistent and fair evaluation of hexahedral meshing algorithms and related techniques. The tetrahedral meshes have been generated with Gmsh, starting from 63 computer-aided design (CAD) models coming from various databases. To highlight and label the various and challenging aspects of hexahedral mesh generation, the CAD models are classified into three categories: simple, nasty and industrial. For each CAD model, we provide three kinds of tetrahedral meshes. The mesh generation yielding those 189 tetrahedral meshes is defined thanks to Snakemake, a modern workflow management system, which allows us to define a fully automated, extensible and sustainable workflow. It is possible to download the whole dataset or to pick some meshes by browsing the online catalog. Since there is no doubt that the hexahedral meshing techniques are going to progress, the HEXME dataset is also built with evolution in mind. A public GitHub repository hosts the HEXME workflow, in which external contributions and future releases are possible and encouraged.

cs.CG↗

arXiv2020

Ginzburg-Landau energy and placement of singularities in generated cross fields

Cross field generation is often used as the basis for the construction of block-structured quadrangular meshes, and the field singularities have a key impact on the structure of the resulting meshes. In this paper, we extend Ginzburg-Landau cross field generation methods with a new formulation that allows a user to impose inner singularities. The cross field is computed via the optimization of a linear objective function with localized quadratic constraints. This method consists in fixing singularities in small holes drilled in the computational domain with specific degree conditions on their boundaries, which leads to non-singular cross fields on the drilled domain. We also propose a way to calculate the Ginzburg-Landau energy of these cross fields on the perforated domain by solving a Neumann linear problem. This energy converges to the energy of the Ginzburg-Landau functional as epsilon and the radius of the holes tend to zero. To obtain insights concerning the sum of the inner singularity degrees, we give: (i) an extension of the Ginzburg-Landau energy to the piecewise smooth domain allowing to identify the positions and degrees of the boundary singularities, and (ii) an interpretation of the Poincaré-Hopf theorem focusing on internal singularities.

math.NA↗

arXiv2020

Automatic surface mesh generation for discrete models: A complete and automatic pipeline based on reparameterization

Triangulations are an ubiquitous input for the finite element community. However, most raw triangulations obtained by imaging techniques are unsuitable as-is for finite element analysis. In this paper, we give a robust pipeline for handling those triangulations, based on the computation of a one-to-one parametrization for automatically selected patches of input triangles, which makes each patch amenable to remeshing by standard finite element meshing algorithms. Using only geometrical arguments, we prove that a discrete parametrization of a patch is one-to-one if (and only if) its image in the parameter space is such that all parametric triangles have a positive area. We then derive a non-standard linear discretization scheme based on mean value coordinates to compute such one-to-one parametrizations, and show that the scheme does not discretize a Laplacian on a structured mesh. The proposed pipeline is implemented in the open source mesh generator Gmsh, where the creation of suitable patches is based on triangulation topology and parametrization quality, combined with feature edge detection. Several examples illustrate the robustness of the resulting implementation.

cs.CG↗

arXiv2020

Computing cross fields -- A PDE approach based on the Ginzburg-Landau theory

This paper proposes a method to compute crossfields based on the Ginzburg-Landau theory. The Ginzburg-Landau functional has two terms: the Dirichlet energy of the distribution and a term penalizing the mismatch between the fixed and actual norm of the distribution. Directional fields on surfaces are known to have a number of critical points, which are properly identified with the Ginzburg-Landau approach: the asymptotic behavior of Ginzburg-Landau problem provides well-distributed critical points over the 2-manifold, whose indices are as low as possible. The central idea in this paper is to exploit this theoretical background for crossfield computation on arbitrary surfaces. Such crossfields are instrumental in the generation of meshes with quadrangular elements. The relation between the topological properties of quadrangular meshes and crossfields are hence first recalled. It is then shown that a crossfield on a surface can be represented by a complex function of unit norm with a number of critical points, i.e., a nearly everywhere smooth function taking its values in the unit circle of the complex plane. As maximal smoothness of the crossfield is equivalent with minimal energy, the crossfield problem is equivalent to an optimization problem based on Ginzburg-Landau functional. A discretization scheme with Crouzeix-Raviart elements is applied and the correctness of the resulting finite element formulation is validated on the unit disk by comparison with an analytical solution. The method is also applied to the 2-sphere where, surprisingly but rightly, the computed critical points are not located at the vertices of a cube, but at those of an anticube.

math.NA↗

arXiv2020

Quaternionic octahedral fields: SU(2) parameterization of 3D frames

3D frame fields are auxiliary for hexahedral mesh generation. There mainly exist three ways to represent 3D frames: combination of rotations, spherical harmonics and fourth order tensor. We propose here a representation carried out by the special unitary group. The article strongly relies on \cite{du1964homographies}. We first describe the rotations with quaternions, \cite[§13-15]{du1964homographies}. We define and show the isomorphism between unit quaternions and the special unitary group, \cite[§16]{du1964homographies}. The frame field space is identified as the quotient group of rotations by the octahedral group, \cite[§20]{du1964homographies}. The invariant forms of the vierer, tetrahedral and octahedral groups are successively built, without using homographies \cite[§39]{du1964homographies}. Modifying the definition of the isomorphism between unit quaternions and the special unitary group allows to use the invariant forms of the octahedral group as a unique parameterization of the orientation of 3D frames. The parameterization consists in three complex values, corresponding to a coordinate of a variety which is embedded in a three complex valued dimensional space. The underlined variety is the model surface of the octahedral group, which can be expressed with an implicit equation. We prove that from a coordinate of the surface, we may identify all the quaternions giving the corresponding 3D frames. We show that the euclidean distance between two coordinates does not correspond to the actual distance of the corresponding 3D frames. We derive the expression of three components of a coordinate in the case of frames sharing an even direction. We then derive a way to ensure that a coordinate corresponds to the special unitary group. Finally, the attempted numerical schemes to compute frame fields are given.

math.AT↗

arXiv2017

High quality mesh generation using cross and asterisk fields: Application on coastal domains

This paper presents a method to generate high quality triangular or quadrilateral meshes that uses direction fields and a frontal point insertion strategy. Two types of direction fields are considered: asterisk fields and cross fields. With asterisk fields we generate high quality triangulations, while with cross fields we generate right-angled triangulations that are optimal for transformation to quadrilateral meshes. The input of our algorithm is an initial triangular mesh and a direction field calculated on it. The goal is to compute the vertices of the final mesh by an advancing front strategy along the direction field. We present an algorithm that enables to efficiently generate the points using solely information from the base mesh. A multi-threaded implementation of our algorithm is presented, allowing us to achieve significant speedup of the point generation. Regarding the quadrangulation process, we develop a quality criterion for right-angled triangles with respect to the local cross field and an optimization process based on it. Thus we are able to further improve the quality of the output quadrilaterals. The algorithm is demonstrated on the sphere and examples of high quality triangular and quadrilateral meshes of coastal domains are presented.

cs.CG↗