Volumetric Meshing

[DanielPiker]

This conversation seems to be about 2 quite different things -

• filling a shape with many small volumetric elements (tetrahedra or hexahedra), such as you would use for a solid FEA. This is the typical meaning of the term ‘volumetric meshing’.
• finding a single closed surface which closely wraps a shape, getting rid of holes and interior objects

For the latter, maybe something from this discussion is helpful:

Extracting only the outer & visible surfaces of a complex model

I was trying out an idea for this recently - a sort of inverse of an isovist. So instead of finding the volume reached by rays projected out from a point in an interior, taking a sphere around an object and projecting rays inwards towards the center. It’s simple and fairly fast to calculate, since for each point of the sphere it just needs to find the first intersection of a ray with the objects. Because the rays don’t cross, the resulting mesh shouldn’t have any self-intersections as long as …