STL and Foreign Surface Mesh Support

CENTAUR can read both ASCII and binary STL files that contain a set of triangular facets that describe the geometry. This type of representation is most common for scanned geometries like biomedical geometries and terrain mapping. STL-based CAD can be used in conjunction with traditional CAD, e.g. adding a wind turbine to a terrain or adding a bounding box around a scanned geometry.

Once imported, STL-based CAD geometries are cleaned and ridges to be preserved are identified. Then, the geometry can either be remeshed using CENTAUR or the faces can be used directly as a foreign surface mesh. This allows for a surface mesh from another tool to be used as a starting point for CENTAUR mesh generation.