Illustrative visualization: interrogating triangulated surfaces

Abstract

Geometrical modeling is a crucial aspect of simulations involving manufactured objects and is usually performed using free-form surfaces. However, to simulate the flow through or about a manufactured object or to simulate structural integrity, the free-form surfaces must be tessellated into triangulated surfaces. To concurrently visualize the simulation results and the quality of the surfaces, we present two novel visualization algorithms for triangulated surfaces as opposed to the traditional freeform surfaces. The proposed algorithms are for curvature estimation based on local surface fitting with cubic triangular Bézier patches and for reflection-line computation.