Creating Triangulated Surface Mesh Files in ISS Format
ISS (indexed simplex format) is an ASCII file format that can be read by the current Amroc front-end to the Closest-Point-Transform algorithm. The format is simply
[Space dimension of vertices (3 assumed in the following)] [Dimension of simplex elements (2)]
[Number of vertices]
[Vertex 0: x-coord y-coord z-coord]
[Vertex 1: x-coord y-coord z-coord]
....
[Vertex N-1: x-coord y-coord z-coord]
[Number of triangle connectivities]
[Connection 0: VertexIndex(0,0) VertexIndex(0,1) VertexIndex(0,2)]
...
[Connection M-1: VertexIndex(M-1,0) VertexIndex(M-1,1) VertexIndex(M-1,2)]
In the following, ONE possibility is described to create industry-type triangulated surface meshes in ISS format:
- Get a cost-free academic license for the professional mesher Cubit by Sandia National Laboratories and install it for instance on a Linux machine.
- Create your 3d model with Cubit and mesh the surfaces you want to export with one of the schemes "TriMesh" or "TriDelaunay".
- Before you export your mesh, type
set default block surface into the Cubit command window.
- Export the mesh as an Exodus file.
- Use the tool
ncdump that is part of the freely available NetCDF suite by Unidata to convert the binary Exodus file from Cubit into an ASCII file. Syntax: ncdump mesh.exo > mesh.txt
- Use the conversion script
stlib/data/geom/mesh/utilities/exodus2iss32.py to convert the ASCII Exodus file into an ASCII ISS file. Syntax: python stlib/data/geom/mesh/utilities/exodus2iss32.py mesh.txt mesh.iss
- The directory
stlib/examples/geom/mesh= contains some additional tools to work with ISS files.
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RalfDeiterding - 06 Jun 2006