Tetrahedra Based Adaptive Polygonization of Implicit Surface Patches

This paper presents a tetrahedra based adaptive polygonization technique for tessellating implicit surface patches. An implicit surface patch is defined as an implicit surface bounded by its intersections with a set of clipping surfaces and which lies within an enclosing tetrahedron. To obtain the polygonization of an implicit surface patch, the tetrahedron containing the patch is adaptively subdivided into smaller tetrahedra according to the criteria introduced in the paper. The result is a set of tetrahedra each containing a facet approximating the surface. The intersections between the facets and the clipping surfaces are used to locate the surface patch boundary. Ambiguous results in generating the facets for highly curved surfaces or surfaces with singular points are also addressed. The result of the polygonization is a set of triangular facets that can be used for visualization and numerical analysis. The proposed method is also suitable for locating the intersection of two implicit surfaces.