[Insight-users] Contrib: TriangleCell with centroid and normal

[Gavin Baker]

Hello Luis,

On Mon, Jul 25, 2005 at 09:05:09PM -0400, Luis Ibanez wrote:

> Have you had a chance to look at the SimplexMesh ?
> 
> It may be useful for what you are doing, the
> Simplex Mesh is actually the dual of a triangular
> Mesh and it keeps track of the normals on its
> nodes, which are associated to the triangular
> faces of a triangular Mesh.

Yes, the Simplex Mesh is very elegant.  However, as I understand it, the
polygon defined by a simplex cell is not guaranteed to be planar, and the
normals are interpolated across the surface.  These characteristics may not
always be desireable.  (I'm not sure if it matters in my particular case yet.)

> If you still find your new Mesh to be more effective
> then we will be happy to add it to the toolkit.

I'll see how I go with this extension; I'd have to convert a fair bit of
code.  Extending the TriangleCell in this way ought to be consistent with
things like OpenGL and VTK.

> We will need a better (longer) name since we avoid
> to use acronyms on the class names.

Of course; I'm just terribly lazy. :)   I guess
TriangleCellWithCentroidAndNormal would probably be more consistent with
naming conventions.

Best regards,

  :: Gavin

-- 
Gavin Baker                                      Complex Systems Group
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~gavinb             The University of Melbourne