Free Triangular

) to create an unstructured triangular mesh on boundaries in 3D and domains in 2D, also for imported meshes in 3D. You can control the number, size, distribution, and refinement of elements by using Size, Size Expression, Distribution, and Corner Refinement subnodes (only and subnodes are available for imported meshes). A remeshing operation in an imported meshing sequence separates the selected boundaries from the mesh, creates geometry from the separated mesh, meshes the geometry, and then copies the new generated mesh onto the original imported mesh. This operation has the following practical implications:

	Only boundaries with first-order elements can be remeshed.

To create an unstructured triangular mesh:

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From the contextual toolbar (macOS and Linux), choose from the menu (

) (3D components) or click for 2D components.

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Right-click a node and choose . For 3D components, this is selected from the menu except when used for imported meshes.

Then enter the properties for the triangular meshing operation using the following sections:

Define the boundaries (3D) or domains (2D) where you want to create an unstructured triangular mesh. Choose the level of the geometry from the list:

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Choose (3D) or (2D) to specify the geometric entities for which you want to create an unstructured triangular mesh. Choose in the list to select the boundaries or domains in the window or choose (3D) or (2D) to select all boundaries or all domains.

For imported meshes in 3D, the available options in the list are and .

To scale the geometry during the meshing operation, change the x-scale, y-scale, and z-scale in 3D to positive real numbers. If any of the scale factors are not equal to one (1), the software scales the geometry in the x, y, and z directions before meshing. After meshing, it restores the geometry and mesh to fit the original size. The scale factors make it possible to generate meshes that are anisotropic, and they are useful if the mesh generator creates many elements due to a thin geometry or if the mesh generation fails due to large aspect ratios in the geometry.

This section is not available for imported meshes.

Select the check box to smooth the transition in element size across removed control entities. You can specify the number of smoothing iterations in the field. In the field you can specify the maximum element depth, from the boundary layer interface, for the mesh points to be smoothed.

Here you can specify the triangulation method used when creating the triangular mesh. Select (default) to let the software use the method that is best suited for the geometry, select to use a method based on a Delaunay algorithm, or select to use a method based on an advancing front algorithm.

This section is only available for imported meshes.

You can optionally simplify the mesh. The simplification can remove small defects typically present in mesh data from measurements, such as tomography, and it can speed up the process by removing unnecessary elements from all kind of meshes. The check box is selected by default to enable simplification.

The (default value: 0.01) is relative to the dimensions of the entire geometry and specifies a global limit for how much the mesh can be modified. The (default value: 1) is relative to the local feature size, as estimated by the algorithm, and is combined with the global limit to produce a limit for how much the mesh can be modified at a certain location. If the mesh contains many defects that you want to remove, you could try to increase the value of the . If the mesh describes the desired geometry with high accuracy, you may want to decrease this factor instead.