Introduction
JFreeMesh is a 3D mesh library written in Java and providing a high level API for mesh manipulation. JFreeMesh is based on a descending mesh data structure but simulates a full connectivity mesh by providing optimized method to access to any upper mesh element by using the global mesh methods. Therefore, JFreeMesh allows to load a large amount of mesh elements for a small memory foot print. JFreeMesh comes with a default mesh loader based on the
GMSH file format and provides, through the JFreeMesh-VTK package, an exporter to
VTK.
For the moment the implemented mesh elements are:
- point
- line
- triangle
- tetrahedron
Goal
The goal of this library is to provide an high performance light weight mesh structure which provides the whole set of connectivity for simple and quick manipulation in case of mesh based dataset.
Principle
We do not provide the set of each mesh element type with their connectivity but instead
we provide a mesh object which keeps track of the mesh elements connectivity in the
most effective way in term of memory cost and access time.
Mesh structure
Each specific mesh element provides its implicit connection with its local methods and
the global mesh object provides a set of methods in order to allow direct manipulation of
mesh objects. By this way, the end user is not aware of the real implementation of the
mesh.
Applications / References
JFreeMesh is used in :
- the Keridwen Integrated Modelling Environment (IME) and for the SPIS Project initiated by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the CNES. SPIS is currently maintained in the frame of the SPINE community.
- Cassandra, the 3D scientific visualisation framework, to allow Cassandra to import GMSH file and view it in the VTK view.
