Meshes: Build facets from edge and point information only

Is there a way to build the facet information of a mesh (triangular, quadrangular, voronoi, mixed) having only the edge and nodal information?

Answer 1

[TED MOSBY]

Hi Ziruela,

To reconstruct face connectivity from a set of edges and nodes in MATLAB, you generally implement a graph or half‐edge–type algorithm that walks your edges and assembles closed loops representing each facet. This will be similar to finding cycles in a graph. There is no single built‐in MATLAB command that will recover all facets from just edge and node data.

The core idea is to:

1. Build adjacency information for each node (which edges connect there, and how do we move from one edge to the next around a node).
2. Identify boundary vs. interior edges if necessary (e.g., edges with only one incident face are boundary edges).
3. Trace out faces by walking the boundary/mesh in a consistent orientation until you come back to the start.

Hope this helps!