The -q switch
- Quality mesh generation by my variant of a hybrid of
Jim Ruppert's
Delaunay refinement algorithm and Paul Chew's
Delaunay refinement algorithm.
(Ruppert's paper describing his algorithm, and my papers describing
my variations, are available from the
Research Credit page.)
- Adds vertices to the mesh to ensure that no angle smaller than
20o occurs. Clearly, small angles between input segments cannot
be eliminated; usually, all other small angles are.
- An alternative minimum angle may be specified after the `q'. For
instance, -q14.3 specifies a minimum angle of 14.3o.
- If the minimum angle is 20.7o or smaller,
the triangulation algorithm is theoretically guaranteed to
terminate (assuming infinite precision arithmetic - Triangle may
fail to terminate if you run out of precision).
- In practice, the algorithm often succeeds for minimum angles
up to 33o. It usually doesn't terminate for angles above
34o.
- For some meshes, however, it may be necessary to reduce
the minimum angle to well below 20o to avoid problems associated
with insufficient floating-point precision.
Detailed information on quality meshing.
Return to command line switches.
Return to Triangle home page.
jrs@cs.berkeley.edu