Facet Manipulations
Mesh data sometimes requires manipulation either due to errors in the original data or to change either the complexity or type. The Facet Manipulation tools allow some change to the underlying data by working with the facets (triangles) directly.
Planar feature combination.
Planar features are those triangles that are connected to other triangles and parallel to them. The Planar Feature combination tool finds these surfaces and combines simple triangles into more complicated polygons. The underlying data is not affectsd an is thus useful for bodies that contain a large number of flat surfaces. The combination of the data usually results in the file being more compact as well as better defined for CAD applications.
Degeneracy Check
Some mesh data can contain degenerate data such as facets that have no area (all points lie on a straight line) or facets that are only attached by one edge to two other facets. Though there are other errors that are frequently encountered, this tool allows some of the more basic issues to be automatically fixed.
Surface Repair
This is a direct editing tool that can be used for cases where the actual data is to be manually manipulated. Options for this tool include moving individual vertices, deleting and creating triangular facets, flipping individual normals and sewing holes by means of new triangles.
Automatic Normal Alignment
This tool checks the normal vectors (vector perpendicular from a triangle) and ensures that any neighboring facets are aligned.
Normal Flip
Sometimes that normals are all aligned but are pointing towards the center of the body rather than outwards. This tool can flip entire bodies' normals whichi is usueful for cases where the alignment tool incorrectly aligns the vectors to point towards the center.
Hole Patching
For simple cases where holes are found in the body, the Hole Patching tool can create new triangles to fill the space.
Vertex Collapse
Depending on the accuracy of the imported data, different facets can be recognized as not being connected even though they are close to each other and should be connected. The Vertex Collapse tool can find vertices that are non manifold (don't belong to a closed surface) and combines them with close proximity neighbors.
Edge Collapse
The Edge Collapse tool can be used to explicitly collapse edges that are of a given length or shorter. An Edge length histogram shows the distribution of edge lengths.
Surface inflation
Often a body will be simply a shell, not a solid. This can be due to data being 3D scanned and no 'bottom' being added to close the surface into a solid. For cases where only a section is available (such as a thin sheet or similar), the inflation tool can generate an offset surface that is connected to the original body to form a solid. The offset can be defined by various methods such as through a relative offset or a distance based on the smallest edge size,
Decimation
Note: This is still a Beta feature that has not yet been fully tested.
The decimation tool allows complex data to be reduced in the number of facets present by selectively collapsing edges or facets until a size constraint has been met. The collapses are selected based on their influence on the overall geometry and thus even complex shapes can be reduced by a large percentage and still resemble the original data. In addition to the edge/facet collapse, an unusual algorithm is available that allows a reallocation of the vertices (corner points of the triangles) to a coarser grid and thus eliminates items that are underdefined. The algorithm is capable of reversing the locations after the collapse back to their original location thus allowing shapes such as spheres to still resemble their original form and not introduce location error which may be of importance for re-creating in CAD.