Forced Sweepability

In some cases, decomposition alone is not sufficient to provide the necessary topology for sweeping. The forced sweepability capability attempts to force a model to have sweepable topology given a set of source and target surfaces. The source-target pairs may have been identified manually by the user, or defined as one the solutions from the sweep suggestion algorithm described above. All of the surfaces between source and target surfaces are referred to as linking surfaces. Linking surfaces must be mappable or submappable in order for the sweeping algorithm to be successful. There are various topology configurations that will prevent linking surfaces from being mappable or submappable.

Diagnostics: The first check that is made is for small curves. Small curves will not necessarily introduce topology that is not mappable or submappable but will often enforce unneeded mesh resolution and will often degrade mesh quality as the mesh size has to transition from small to large. Next, the interior angles of each surface are checked to see if they deviate far from 90 multiples. As the deviation from 90 multiples increases the mapping and submapping algorithms have a harder time classifying corners in the surface. If either of these checks identify potential problems they are flagged and potential solutions are generated.

Solutions: If linking surface problems are identified ITEM will analyze the surface and generate potential solutions for resolving the problem. Compositing the problem linking surface with one of its neighbors is a current solution that is provided. ITEM will look at the neighboring surfaces to decide which combination will be best. When remedying bad interior angles the new interior angles that would result after the composite are calculated in order to choose the composite that would produce the best interior angles. Another criterion that is considered is the dihedral angle between the composite candidates. Dihedral angles close to 180 are desirable. The suggested solutions are prioritized based on these criteria before being presented to the user. Figure 1 shows an example of a model before and after running the forced sweepability solutions. The top and bottom of the cylinder were chosen as the source and target surfaces respectively.

Figure 1. Non-submappable linking surface topology is composited out to force a sweepable volume topology