tetgen1.51

A quality tetrahedral mesh generator

Usage

tetgen [-pq__a__AriYMS__T__dzjo_fengGOJBNEFICQVvh] file

Overview

This manual page documents briefly the tetgen command. Full documentation is available online: http://tetgen.berlios.de/

tetgen generates the Delaunay tetrahedralization, Voronoi diagram, and convex hull for three-dimensional point sets, generates the constrained Delaunay tetrahedralizations and quality tetrahedral meshes for three-dimensional domains with piecewise linear boundary.

Options

A summary of options is included below. For a complete description, see the online documentation.

-p: Tetrahedralizes a picecwise linear complex (.poly or .smesh file).

-q: Quality mesh generation. A minimum radius-edge ratio may be specifyed (default 2.0).

-a: Applies a maximum tetrahedron volume constraint.

-A: Assigns attributes to identify tetrahedra in certain regions.

-r: Reconstructs/Refines a previously generated mesh.

-Y: Suppresses boundary facets/segments splitting.

-i: Inserts a list of additional points into mesh.

-M: Does not merge coplanar facets.

-T: Set a tolerance for coplanar test (default 1e-8).

-d: Detect intersections of PLC facets.

-z: Numbers all output items starting from zero.

-j: Jettison unused vertices from output .node file.

-o2: Generates second-order subparametric elements.

-f: Outputs faces (including non-boundary faces) to .face file.

-e: Outputs subsegments to .edge file.

-n: Outputs tetrahedra neighbors to .neigh file.

-g: Outputs mesh to .mesh file for viewing by Medit.

-G: Outputs mesh to .msh file for viewing by Gid.

-O: Outputs mesh to .off file for viewing by Geomview.

-B: Suppresses output of boundary information.

-N: Suppresses output of .node file.

-E: Suppresses output of .ele file.

-F: Suppresses output of .face file.

-I: Suppresses mesh iteration numbers.

-C: Checks the consistency of the final mesh.

-Q: Quiet: No terminal output except errors.

-V: Verbose: Detailed information on what I'm doing.

-v: Prints the version information.

-h: Help: A brief instruction for using TetGen.

Examples

The wing is described in two files: wing.node and wing.poly. The command line:

tetgen -pq wing

generates the quality mesh in three files: wing.1.node, wing.1.ele, and wing.1.face.

Default, the radius-edge ratio of each tetrahedron is bounded below 2.0. You can impose a tight bound by adding a number directly after the '-q' switch. Like this:

tetgen -pq1.2 wing

generates a quality mesh which have more points inserted than the mesh created in above.

See http://tetgen.berlios.de/switches.examples.html for more examples.