FIST (Fast, Industrial-Strength Triangulation)

MESHING
RESEARCH
CORNER

MESH/GRID
GENERATION
SOFTWARE
SURVEY

Contact: Martin Held

Email: held@cosy.sbg.ac.at

Web Site: http://www.cosy.sbg.ac.at/~held/projects/triang/triang.html

Availability: Research Code, Source Code Available

license agreement is required for any form of non-academic use.

Customer Support: Yes

Approximate Number of Users: Unknown

Pricing: Please contact Martin Held (held@cosy.sbg.ac.at) for information about licensing FIST.

Platform: Windows, UNIX

FIST has been implemented in ANSI C on Sun workstations. It has been
tested on a variety of Unix platforms, and can be expected to work with
virtually any ANSI C compiler, on any platform. (However, some of its
Unix/X11 features such as its graphical user interface and its imake file
will be of little use on non-Unix platforms, or need to be disabled by
means of compile-time switches.)

Input: Native

Wavefront's OBJ format, and/or native input format.


FIST can output data in Wavefront's OBJ format and in SGI's SGO format.

Engineering Discipline:

Any discipline that needs a reliable and fast polygon triangulator

Elements: Triangle, Quadrilateral

Surface Meshing: Yes

Tri/Tet Method:

Ear clipping enhanced with some heuristics for achieving nicer triangles.

Quad/Hex Method: Indirect

FIST also has a very simple postprocessing to group triangles into quads.

Element Sizing Method:

FIST does not offer any control over the element size.

Other Features:

Comments:

FIST is one of the very few triangulation codes that are fast and truly robust, even if the input exhibits degeneracies or deficiencies.

It can handle 2D polygons (with holes) and 3D polygonal facets (whose vertices are roughly coplanar). No curved boundaries are supported, though.