Menu Entries
The surface editor's Surface menu is is displayed in the menu bar while the editor is active. Four submenus
are accessible from this menu: Edit, View, Buffer, and Tests.
Each of these is described separately below.
Edit Menu
- Undo: Undoes the last edit operation (edge flip, edge collapse,
edge bisection, vertex movement). Selection and highlight changes can
be undone as well. The size of the undo buffer is limited to 100
entries.
- Delete highlighted faces: Permanently removes the highlighted
triangles from the surface.
- Remove coplanar faces: Permanently removes coplanar triangles,
i.e., triangles with the same three vertices, from the surface. The
inner region and outer region id of the remaining triangle is updated
appropriately.
- Recompute connectivity: Recomputes the surface's connectivity
information, i.e., contours and branching points. Connectivity
information is optional. If it is present, contours can be displayed
using the Surface Patch Contours module. In addition,
recompute connectivity causes unused points of the surface to
be deleted.
- Refine faces: Subdivides all highlighted triangles by bisecting
their edges. Each refined triangle is replaced by four new ones. In
addition, adjacent non-highlighted triangles are split in two in order
to avoid dangling nodes.
- Smooth faces: Smoothes all highlighted triangles by shifting
their vertices. Each vertex is shifted towards the average position of
its neighbors. Special care is taken in the case of boundary vertices,
for which not all the neighbors are considered, but only those that
are also on the boundary. In this way sharp boundaries are preserved.
- Flip edges...: Pops up a dialog allowing you to flip certain
edges inside the highlighted part of the surface. The edge flips are
performed in order to improve the aspect ratio of the involved
triangles. An edge flip is only attempted if the aspect ratio of one
of the two involved triangles is worse than a user-specified value,
and the crease angle between them is below a user-defined threshold.
- Reorder patches...: Pops up a dialog allowing you to rearrange
the internal order of the surface patches. Two different patches can be
selected and then swapped. This operation is useful for certain
applications where two different surfaces are required to have the
same patch structure.
- Set boundary ids...: Pops up a dialog allowing you to edit the
surface's boundary ids. The dialog permits you to define new boundary
ids or to change existing ones (including the preferred colors).
Highlighted triangles can be assigned a new boundary id using the
dialog's set button.
See the surface boundaries editor help page
for more details.
- Fix intersections...: Pops up a dialog for an automatic repair
of intersecting triangles. The total number and the number of fixed
intersections will be shown in the console window.
- Fix small dihedral angles...: Pops up a dialog for an automatic
repair of small dihedral angles. The dialog offers two different
repair modes: vertex smoothing, and a combination of edge flips and
vertex shifts. The dialog lets you define a lower bound for the
dihedral angle.
- Fix tetra quality...: This tool provides an automatic repair
of configurations which might induce large tetrahedron aspect ratios.
It pops up a dialog where you can specify an upper bound and an
attempted value for the tetrahedron aspect ratio.
- Prepare Generate Tetra Grid...: This tool may be useful if you want to
create a tetrahedral volume mesh from the surface. It combines the
Flip edges, Fix small dihedral angles, and Fix tetra
quality tools. You can specify a lower bound and an attempted value
for the tetrahedron aspect ratio.
- Fill Hole...: This menu entry shows a drop-down menu in the
properties panel with a selection of hole fill algorithms.
By pressing the fill button the currently displayed hole
is triangulated using the selected hole fill algorithm.
- Magic wand settings...: This menu entry pops up a dialog
alowing you to change parameters of the magic
wand tool. Details for that are described below.
View Menu
This menu allows you to change certain settings of the
Surface View module used by the surface editor.
The settings affect the draw style and the color mode used for rendering
the surface. Possible draw styles are outlined, shaded, lines, points, and transparent. Possible color modes are
normal, mixed, twisted, and Boundary Conditions. In the
first three modes colors are chosen according to the material ids assigned
to the surface's patches. In the last mode colors are chosen according to
the triangles' boundary ids.
Buffer Menu
This menu contains several entries for modifying the editor's highlight
and view buffers. The buffers determine whether a triangle is highlighted
or whether it is visible in a normal fashion. Both buffers are independent
from each other. They can be stored in an internal backup buffer
using the menu entries copy highlights and copy buffer
respectively. Once one of the buffers has been copied it can be
restored using paste highlights or paste buffer.
Tests Menu
This menu lists certain test operations which can be performed in order
to check the quality and consistency of the surface. Internally, the tests
are considered as selectors because they cause certain triangles of
the surface to be highlighted. Therefore, the test are described in detail
in the selectors section.