Blend Surfaces

Blend surfaces are common in solid model meshing problems. A blend surface, also known as a fillet or chamfer, is problematic for sweeping algorithms which have trouble assigning vertex types on blend surfaces. While blend surfaces present a challenge for meshing applications, there are many tools within ITEM to help guide the user through possible solutions.

Diagnostic: Blend surfaces are detected by looping over the curves on a surface and examining the angles, surface normals, and curvature of curves and adjacent surfaces.

Solutions: The current solution to blend surfaces is to remove the surface and attempt to extend adjacent surfaces to fill in the gap. An example of blend surfaces that have been removed is shown below. This is useful for models which can be simplified without losing important topology.

Figure 1. A volume which has been simplified by removing blend surfaces.