Building Three-Dimensional Merged Surface Model from Polygonal Models

Abstract

Three-dimensional surface merging plays an important role in rapid prototyping manufacture, physically based modeling and finite element analysis. In this paper, a rapid merging method is proposed to build three-dimensional water-proof surface model from polygonal models. To rapidly determine merging boundaries, collision detection techniques are used to obtain the intersection triangle pairs between the two input models, and then the intersection line loops are accurately computed. Furthermore, triangle tessellation and edge searching method is used to generate new triangles and classify each triangle in models into different triangle sets. Finally, an inclusion test determines the position of each triangle set and stitches the labeled triangle sets into the merged model. The experimental results demonstrate the robustness and adaptability of the presented method.