Mesh Smoother Visualization in Rocketeer
Please be patient while the movies load. They are animated gifs,
and are almost 3 megabytes each. Each movie represents 20 passes
of the smoother with every 2nd step rendered.
The entire bunny surface:
Notice that our special treatment of features appears to be
succesful. Important geometric features such as the shape of
the ears is not changing even as the topology of the mesh
changes. The current implementation of the algorithm gives
equal weight to preserving original element sizes and obtaining
elements with perfect shape. In the case of triangular elements,
we are hoping to obtain equilateral triangles.
The same surface, only poor quality elements rendered:
Only elements with a shape metric less than .75 are rendered.
The shape metric ranges from 0 to 1, with a higher number indicating
a better quality element. The particular smoother being used here
is a smart smoother, so called because smoothed nodal positions are
only retained if the lowest quality among all neighbor elements is
higher after smoothing. Occasionally, bad elements appear where
none were before. This behavior is actually expected. Elements
with shape values of .7 and .76 might have values of .72 and
.73 after smoothing of a common node.
This mesh is ill-suited to smoothing because of the very poor
quality of the original mesh. Some areas of the surface have
many long thin triangular elements which are more amenable to
local mesh smoothing techniques such as edge flips and point
insertions. Still, it is clear that the number of poor quality
elements decreases significantly as the smoother runs.
