Surface to Tetrahedral Mesh

Question

Does anybody know a way to generate a tetrahedral mesh from the surface of a geometrc object?

I only got 1D and 2D elements (nodes, lines, triangles) in 3D space and want to generate tetrahedrons out of it.

I know that it's not always possible, but I think it should be possible if the lines and triangles are building a valid surface.

Thanks for any hint....

Answer 1

You might look at

Shewchuk, Jonathan Richard. "Constrained Delaunay Tetrahedralizations and Provably Good Boundary Recovery." IMR. 2002. (PDF download.)

In order to get these CDT's, you might have to alter your surface triangulation.

"However, boundary conformity can always be enforced by judicious insertion of additional vertices, combined with CDTs."

Many subsequent algorithms have been developed and implemented based on CDT's.