The Mesh ( or ) nodes enable the discretization of the modeling domain into small units of simple shapes, referred to as mesh elements. See The Mesh Node for more information.

A mesh is the result of building a meshing sequence. A meshing sequence consists of Meshing Operations and Attributes. The attribute nodes store properties that are used by the operations when creating the mesh.

Building an operation creates or modifies the mesh on the entities defined by the operation’s selection. Some of the operations use properties defined by attributes; for example, Free Tetrahedral reads properties from the Size, Distribution, Size Expression and Corner Refinement attribute nodes. If you choose to import a mesh, the Import operation reads properties from the Transform attribute.

An attribute contains properties defined on a selection. You can add an attribute as a node in the meshing sequence (this is referred to as a global attribute node) or add it as a subnode to an operation node (a local attribute node). Global attribute nodes define mesh sizes for all subsequent operation nodes in the meshing sequence, either on the entire geometry or on a selection of entities. Properties defined in a local attribute are only used by the owning operation node and override the corresponding properties defined in global attribute nodes (on the same selection).

The Graphics Window shows the resulting mesh from the operations that have been built. The result of subsequent operations is not visible. The last built operation becomes the current node and appears with a quadratic frame around the feature’s icon (). The frame is green if the feature and all preceding features are built; that is, the mesh in the Graphics window is up to date. The frame is yellow if the feature or some preceding feature has been edited since it was built and needs to be rebuilt ().