Mathematical Modeling and Analysis
Mathematical Modeling and Analysis
Feature painting allows mesh designers to add detail to primary, base meshes by overlaying them with separately meshed shapes, or features. This ability to overlay meshes saves designers from the considerable effort of creating complete meshes directly, beginning again from scratch if a feature's position, orientation, or size is changed.
A particular application of feature painting consists of beginning with a base mesh whose cells are of one material, overlaying a feature mesh whose cells are of a different material, and computing for each base cell the volume fraction of new, feature material. For example, if a particular base cell is four-tenths covered by the feature grid, then that base cell receives a volume fraction of 0.4.
Precise per-cell volume fractions can be used by codes that allow for multimaterial cells. Other codes might arrange for stair-stepping, in which volume fractions of less than 50%, for example, are clipped to 0, while those of 50% or more are clipped to 1.
