I’ve got a specific problem, and I wondered how you would solve it.
Let’s be given a triangular surface mesh M and a closed poly line L that goes along the edges of M. All points of L coincide with points of M. How can I cut M along L? The result should look something like this:
I wonder if there is a simple alternative in vtk. It seems to me like a basic task to cut a surface along a line. But I was not able to figure out a robust way.
Alright friends, I wrote my own scissor, see attachment. The code is fairly complete. Here’s the idea:
Prepare input data. Mainly: extract line points and find them in the source.
Collect the cells “left” of the cut-line (“left” with respect to cell orientation), see Fig. 1
Copy the points of the source mesh, duplicate the points along the cut-line.
Replace the cells identified in step 1) with cells using the new points created in step 2)
The trickiest part is step 1). I had to write a sub-routine traverseNeighborsClockwise(source, pId0, pIdA, pIdB) that returns the cell ids and point ids of a counter-clockwise “sweep” around the central point pId0, see Fig. 2. This sweep starts with pIdA and (optionally) stops with pIdB. (I’m sure that such a functionality has been done elsewhere already, but I was not able to find it.)
My implementation will create (at least) two topologically separated surfaces. Of course, I’m certainly missing several corner cases and performance (my implementation is in python) - but it works for my type of data. (It even handles self-intersecting cut-lines without failures, but one would have to elaborate a bit more on this, I guess.)
