[vtk-developers] VTK classes useful for meshless methods visualization

[Michel Audette]

Dear VTK developers,

I'm interested in the development of a visualization technique for meshless
methods, which is a fairly hot topic in continuum mechanics these days, in
the course of a proposal that I am writing.

The basic idea is that the meshless formalism does away with an assemblage
of elements, which in 3D would normally be tetrahedra, and replaces finite
elements with functions of local support (eg radial basis functions)
centered at each point, within a cloud of points, in discretizing partial
differential equations. It turns out that the expressions in finite elements
that relate deformation, stress and strain and that normally would be solved
in their weak form on a system of equations based on* elemental* shape
functions instead can be restated in terms of *radial *shape functions
defined about one point, or node. In short, the computation is done on a
cloud of points, not on a mesh of triangles or tetrahedra.

The main attraction for this type of formalism, is that if the tissue
undergoes a topological change, such as cutting or resection in an
interactive surgery simulator, there is no need to re-mesh dynamically,
which is a complex problem, especially if high-quality tetrahedra are needed
in the re-meshed result to ensure computational stability.

Moreover, visualization of what goes on tends to involve* surfels* (surface
elements), or boundary points of the point-cloud, as well as an estimate of
the surface normal at each boundary point.

My question then is, what classes exist in VTK for handling surface
rendering of a set of surfels, as well as updating the visualization
efficiently to account for possibly resected points, while exploiting the
temporal stability of unresected points?

Thanks for your consideration.

Cheers,

Michel

-- 
Michel Audette, Ph.D.
R & D Engineer,
Kitware Inc.,
Chapel Hill, N.C.
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