SMS:Advancing Front Triangulation

With advancing front triangulation the polygon is filled in layer by layer. In previous versions of SMS, this has been referred to as paving. That term is associated with a specific algorithm, so the terminology is being changed here. The process includes offsetting the polygon boundary to the inside of the polygon (or outside of an island), performing intersections on this new offset layer and redistributing the vertices along the offset arc. The process is performed repeatedly until the area is filled with triangles.

Boundary Spaced Advancing Front

In the advancing front methodology utilized by SMS, the new layer position comes from the spacing on the vertices along the current polygon. The advanced front is created by forming equilateral triangles. The vertices on the new arc are redistributed based on the spatial interpolation of the original boundary spacings. This option requires no further input.

Scalar Advancing Front

SMS supports the option to control the spacing between layers of elements using a size dataset. This is the scalar advancing front method and requires selecting a spatial dataset that is everywhere positive to define the local spacing of the desired mesh. This may come from a variety of sources.

See the tutorials on mesh generation for CGWAVE and ADCIRC for more information.

Related Topics

• Mesh Generation
• Adaptive Tesselation