non-manifold error when clipping polyhedra+hexahedron domain

Support
1

I have a domain that I’m exporting from CFD results (exporter written by me). This domain has mixed cell types, mostly polyhedra & hexahedra.

When I clip the domain, without crinkle cut, I receive the following warning

Generic Warning: In vtkPolyhedron.cxx, line 1801
A cell with a non-manifold triangulation has been encountered. This cell cannot be contoured.

When I crinkle-clip the clip, the error is gone.

Can someone:
a) what is causing the different behaviour when clipping with crinkle vs without
b) explain how I can find the troublesome edges to check if it’s my export process causing this.

I’m not sure if the following is related, but when opening my files in paraview 5.11 the hexahedra cells look “broken” without crinkle clip.
Without crinkle:

image
image847×733 127 KB

With crinkle:

image
image718×748 125 KB

5.13 does not exhibit this issue, but I’m wondering if this is related to the non-manifold issue.

2

Hello,

In a nutshell, a non-manifold mesh is one that cannot be unfolded into a 2D figure with all its normals pointing to the same direcition. A non-manifold geometry generally means some algorithms won’t work well. If it worked before maybe because of a more generalizable (slow) algorithm was used. Perhaps the new implementation is faster but it assumes a manifold well-behaved geometry. So, maybe you need to check for “non-manifoldness” and pre-process your mesh in order to make it manifold (check VTK: vtkFeatureEdges Class Reference).

best,

PC

3

Related topic: Clipping breaks the hexahedron adjacent to the polyhedron