[Gmsh] Meshing algorithms and suggestions

[Christophe Geuzaine]

> On 12 Sep 2018, at 14:31, Guilherme Saturnino <guilhermebs at drcmr.dk> wrote:
> 
> Dear Gmsh developers,
> 
> I'm working on a package called SimNIBS (http://simnibs.org/) that does FEM simulations in human head models. We use gmsh to create tetrahedral meshes from stl surfaces of brain and other tissues. Is there any particular meshing algorithm you would suggest for this application?

I would recommend using the default one.

(Is the quality of the STL meshes sufficient, or do you need to remesh them?)


> What about optimization algorithms? We prefer robustness and quality over speed.

Recent Gmsh versions optimize automatically. We will introduce some fine-tuning in the future to change the speed/quality tradeoff ; currently a good compromise is hardcoded.

> 
> I would also like to suggest 2 improvements for future Gmsh versions:
> 
> 1. Is it possible to provide Gmsh 4 binaries that are compatible with CentOS 6? It is an old but still widely used Linux distribution. This has been holding us back in adopting Gmsh 4.

The official Linux binaries are compiled on the "old-stable" Debian, in order to support even quite old Linux distributions. Can you share the error you get on CentOS 6 ?

> 
> 2. Would it be possible in future releases to have more flexible data types in $NodeData and $ElementNodeData? I think it would be very useful to store single-precision floats (to save space) or integers (to have additional labels for elements and nodes) .

Yes, that's indeed in our plans for a future revision of the MSH4 format, together with even better handling of very large meshes/datasets.

Thanks for the feedback,

Christophe


> 
> 
> Thanks a lot for putting so much time and effort into making this great piece of software.
> 
> 
> Best Regards,
> 
> Guilherme Saturnino
> 
> 
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— 
Prof. Christophe Geuzaine
University of Liege, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science 
http://www.montefiore.ulg.ac.be/~geuzaine

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