triangle refinement

triangle refinement is primarily for use with distance to surface. It can subdivide triangular and quadrilateral cells until none of the sides of the output triangles exceed a user specified length (a default value is calculated as 5% of the x-y extent of your input surface). This increases the accuracy of distance to surface especially when the input surface comes from create_tin and the nodes used to create the TIN are poorly spaced. It can also correct the normals of a surface. It does this by organizing all of the triangles and quadrilaterals in a surface into disjoint patches, and then allowing the user to select which patches have normals that need to be flipped. The maximum number of triangles in a patch is 130,000, any triangles above this number will be considered to be in the next patch.

Removing small cells is used to remove extremely small cells (based on area in your coordinate units squared) that sometimes are generated with CAD triangulation routines that might have their normal vectors reversed and would contribute to poor cutting surface definition.  Try this option if you find that distance to surface is giving anomalous results.  

The maximum edge length allows the maximum length of each triangle side to be set for when the Split Cells option is set.

The ability to fix normals is used to check to that all of the triangles in selected patches of the surface have the same normal vector direction. If the normal is backwards, you can flip the normal of the patch in two ways. The first way is Alt + Right click on a cell in the patch that you wish to flip and then click the Add patch to flip list button. You only need to do this for one cell in each patch. Another way to do this is to set the Cell ID and Cell Data value of a cell in the patch you wish to flip. The Cell Id and Cell Data values must be obtained from the surface being output from triangle refinement, and not the surface being input.

Module Input Ports

Module Output Ports