Developer Documentation

OpenVolumeMesh Documentation

Welcome to the OpenVolumeMesh documentation.

OpenVolumeMesh is a generic data structure for the comfortable handling of arbitrary polyhedral meshes. Its concepts are closely related to OpenMesh (http://www.openmesh.org). In particular, OpenVolumeMesh carries the general idea of storing edges as so-called (directed) half-edges over to the face definitions. So, faces are split up into so-called half-faces having opposing orientations. But unlike in the original concept of half-edges, local incidence information is not stored on a per half-edge basis. Instead, all entities are arranged in arrays, which makes OpenVolumeMesh an index-based data structure where the access to entities via handles is accomplished in constant time complexity. By making the data structure index-based, we alleviate the major drawback of the half-edge data structure of only being capable to represent manifold meshes. In our concept, each entity of dimension only stores an (ordered) tuple of handles (or indices) pointing to the incident entities of dimension . These incidence relations are called the top-down incidences. They are intrinsic to the implemented concept of volumentric meshes. One can additionally compute bottom-up incidences, which means that for each entity of dimension , we also store handles to adjacent entities of dimension . These incidence relations have to be computed explicitly which can be performed in linear time complexity. Both incidence relations, the top-down and the bottom-up incidences, are used to provide a set of iterators and circulators that are comfortable in use. As in OpenMesh, OpenVolumeMesh provides an entirely generic underlying property system that allows attaching properties of any kind to the entities.

In this documentation, we first give a concise overview of the implemented concepts in Section Concepts of OpenVolumeMesh. In Section Iterators and Circulators, we introduce all necessary iterators provided by OpenVolumeMesh. This library is additionally shipped with a file format that allows for reading and permanent storage of the volumetric meshes from/to files. Its specification can be found in File Format. For information on the property system, please refer to Section Property System. Step-by-step tutorials and code examples can be found in the tutorials section. OpenVolumeMesh comes with a complete CMake build system which facilitates building the library platform-independently. It is written in pure C++ using the standard template library and does not have any external dependencies except for GoogleTest which is (optionally) needed for building the unit tests. As per default, the unit tests are excluded from the build but can turned on as desired. Find information on how to build OpenVolumeMesh in Section Building OpenVolumeMesh.

Overview:

- Concepts of OpenVolumeMesh
- Iterators and Circulators
- File Format
- Property System
- Building OpenVolumeMesh

Tutorials:

- Tutorial 01: Creating a Simple Volume Mesh
- Tutorial 02: Using Iterators
- Tutorial 03: Adding Properties
- Tutorial 04: Using File I/O