Ray-Guided Mesh Repair for Watertight 3D Models
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing mesh processing technologies struggle with defects such as gaps, holes, self-intersections, and inconsistent orientations, leading to invalid meshes that hinder downstream applications like simulation and 3D printing, while local repairs lack guarantees and global techniques often introduce undesirable modifications.
Innovation Solution
A mesh repair pipeline utilizing visual measures like visibility, orientation, and openness, guided by ray tracing, performs local adjustments and global optimization to produce watertight, manifold meshes while preserving visual cues and input attributes.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Manufacturing precision
If local repair techniques are used to fix mesh defects, then the mesh can be repaired with minimal modifications, but the repairs lack guarantees and may not produce watertight results
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces visual measures (visibility, orientation, openness) as intermediary metrics that bridge local repair operations with global mesh quality guarantees. These visual measures serve as mediators to evaluate and guide repair operations, ensuring that local modifications contribute to overall watertightness without requiring complete remeshing.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent performs preliminary classification of mesh faces into interior and exterior sets before executing repairs. This preliminary action establishes a reference configuration that guides subsequent repair operations, ensuring that fixes maintain global consistency and watertightness rather than creating isolated local corrections.
2Reliability
If global mesh processing techniques are used to ensure watertightness, then the mesh becomes valid for downstream applications, but undesirable modifications and loss of visual cues occur
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies different processing strategies to different regions of the mesh based on visual measures. Faces are classified into interior and exterior sets with different treatment, and repair operations are localized to specific regions rather than applying uniform global transformations. This preserves visual cues in regions where they are important while ensuring watertightness globally.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent uses visual measures (visibility, orientation, openness) as parameters to guide mesh processing decisions. By changing and optimizing these visual parameters during repair operations, the system maintains visual fidelity while achieving watertightness, rather than relying on geometric parameters alone that may lose visual information.
3Productivity
If traditional mesh processing is used to handle defective meshes, then the processing can be computationally efficient, but the meshes remain invalid for simulation and 3D printing
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the mesh processing task into distinct phases: classification of faces into interior/exterior sets, computation of visual measures for each face, and targeted repair operations. This segmentation allows efficient processing by avoiding unnecessary operations on already-valid regions while focusing computational effort on defective areas that require repair.
4Manufacturing precision
If mesh repair operations are performed to fix gaps and holes, then the mesh topology improves, but unnecessary complexity may be introduced
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts and addresses only the specific defective regions (gaps, holes, self-intersections) identified through visual measures, rather than applying uniform repair operations across the entire mesh. This extraction approach fixes topological errors while preserving the simplicity of well-formed regions, avoiding unnecessary complexity.
Data Source
AI summary
Aspects of the disclosure provide methods and apparatuses for mesh processing. In some examples, a method for mesh processing includes receiving an input mesh that is bounded in a bounding box. The input mesh is formed of a first plurality of vertices and a first plurality of faces that connects the first plurality of vertices. The method further includes calculating at least a first visual measure for one or more faces in the first plurality of faces. At least the first visual measure for a face is calculated according to a number of valid rays respectively at a plurality of sampling positions of the face, a valid ray at a sampling position is a ray that is traced from the sampling position to the bounding box. The method also includes performing adjustments to the input mesh to generate a repaired mesh according to at least the first visual measure.