Locally Meshable Frame Fields

Abstract

The main robustness issue of state-of-the-art frame field based hexahedral mesh generation algorithms originates from non-meshable topological configurations, which do not admit the construction of an integer-grid map but frequently occur in smooth frame fields. In this article, we investigate the topology of frame fields and derive conditions on their meshability, which are the basis for a novel algorithm to automatically turn a given non-meshable frame field into a similar but locally meshable one. Despite local meshability is only a necessary but not sufficient condition for the stronger requirement of meshability, our algorithm increases the 2% success rate of generating valid integer-grid maps with state-of-the-art methods to 58%, when compared on the challenging HexMe dataset [Beaufort et al. 2022]. The source code of our implementation and the data of our experiments are available at https://lib.algohex.eu.