The Smooth (Advancing Front) option will generate a tetra mesh using a bottom-up meshing approach using the Advancing Front Tetra mesher. The surface mesh will be created as defined by the Global Mesh Setup settings (or Surface Mesh option). The volume mesh will then be generated from this surface mesh. If a surface mesh exists, you can also specify the Input as Existing Mesh when Compute Mesh is applied.
This meshing method results in a more gradual change in element size. The initial surface mesh should be of fairly high quality.
Note: The surface mesh should be one enclosed volume with no single edges, multiple edges, non-manifold vertices, overlapping elements or duplicate elements. Sudden changes in element size, either adjacent to one another or across a narrow volume gap, can cause quality issues or even failure.
The surface mesh must be either tri or quad elements for the Advancing Front mesh method.
- Expansion Factor
The ratio at which to grow the tetra from the surface mesh. The default is 1. This value directly affects the number of tetra elements generated.
- Do Proximity Checking
This option will check the proximity between nodes to prevent clustering or stretching so that small gaps are filled properly. Enabling this option will result in a longer meshing time.
- Flood fill after completion
This option only pertains to models with multiple material points. If this option is enabled, the created mesh will be assigned to their different volume parts.
- Verbose output
When enabled, this option writes more messages to help in debugging any potential problem. In general you should not need to have this option enabled, but if the mesher has a problem meshing, it may help to enable this for debugging.