Technical Overview

HOOPS Mesh is a robust, fail-safe 2D and 3D mesh generation toolkit designed for seamless integration into CAE and FEM workflows. It offers a unified SDK interface covering mapped mesh generation, planar triangulation, curve/surface meshing, and volume tetrahedralization— empowering developers to embed reliable mesh generation functionality into their applications with minimal disruption to existing data structures.

Key Capabilities

  • Unmatched Reliability

    Built with exact-arithmetic predicate technology and a hardened boundary recovery scheme, HOOPS Mesh delivers robust, error-free mesh generation across complex edge-cases in both 2D and 3D geometries.

  • Support for High-Order Elements

    The toolkit supports mesh generation with linear, parabolic, and cubic elements. Notably, input parabolic surface triangles are accepted directly by the tetrahedral generator, enabling high-quality parabolic volume meshes.

  • Control Over Mesh Size & Quality

    Users can finely control mesh density and quality, with parameters like edge length, growth rate, skew and warp angles, and edge altitude ratios. Mesh sizing can be localized—across model entities, geometric regions, or defined by callbacks—and supports both isotropic and anisotropic definitions.

  • CAD Kernel Interoperability

    HOOPS Mesh comes with integration samples for popular kernels such as Parasolid, Open Cascade, and ACIS. When used with HOOPS Exchange, it seamlessly bridges CAD data to mesh generation.

Modular Mesh Generators

HOOPS Mesh modules are grouped by geometry and mesh type, ensuring developers can pick the most appropriate technique for their mesh requirements.

  • Mapped Mesh & Extrusion
    • MapMesh: Generate structured grids (linear, parabolic, cubic) over parameterized patches in 1D, 2D, or 3D spaces. Supports arbitrary coordinate systems including cylindrical and spherical. Efficiently creates large meshes.
    • ExtMesh: Extrudes a structured mesh from a cross-section (an unstructured mesh), ideal for geometric sweeps and prismatic geometries.
  • 2D Planar Mesh
    • TriMesh: Performs unstructured planar triangulation, automatically generating a high-quality triangle mesh from given 2D boundary inputs— handy for preprocessing before analysis.
  • 3D Curve & Surface Mesh
    • CurvMesh: Builds line-element meshes (linear, parabolic, cubic) from input curves defined as line segments, with support for preserved vertices and tangents.
    • SurfMesh: Generates surface meshes (triangles or quadrilaterals) from facetted input (e.g., tessellated CAD surfaces), with options to preserve points/edges and control refinement via angular and size tolerances.
  • 3D Volume Mesh
    • TetMesh: Creates unstructured tetrahedral meshes from volume geometries, essential for volumetric FEM simulations.

Integration Approach

Developed for easy embedding in existing FEM pre-processing pipelines, HOOPS Mesh respects existing data layouts and offers callback-based control for dynamic mesh sizing. The modular design allows developers to choose between mapped, planar, surface, or volume meshing as needed, and smoothly blend mesh generation into broader CAE workflows.

Given its reliability, flexibility, and CAD interoperability, HOOPS Mesh is an excellent choice for developers seeking to augment their applications with high-quality, production-grade mesh generation capabilities.

HOOPS Mesh is free to evaluate for 60 days on Windows x64 and Linux 64-bit