TETGEN(1)

💖 NAME 💖

tetgen — A Quality Tetrahedral Mesh Generator ✨🧊

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

tetgen [-pq__a__AriYMS__T__dzjo_fengGOJBNEFICQVvh]  file

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

okay bestie, so this manual page gives you the brief rundown of the tetgen command, like the tl;dr version 💅 The full documentation lives online at http://tetgen.berlios.de/ if you wanna go feral and read all of it 🫶

so what does tetgen actually do? it generates the Delaunay tetrahedralization, the Voronoi diagram, and the convex hull for three-dimensional point sets, no cap. and it also generates constrained Delaunay tetrahedralizations and quality tetrahedral meshes for three-dimensional domains with piecewise linear boundary. it's giving geometry main character energy fr fr 🧚

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

here's a lil summary of the options, bestie — for the complete description you gotta check the online documentation 👑

• -p — Tetrahedralizes a picecwise linear complex (.poly or .smesh file).
• -q — Quality mesh generation. A minimum radius-edge ratio may be specifyed (default 2.0).
• -a — Applies a maximum tetrahedron volume constraint.
• -A — Assigns attributes to identify tetrahedra in certain regions.
• -r — Reconstructs/Refines a previously generated mesh.
• -Y — Suppresses boundary facets/segments splitting.
• -i — Inserts a list of additional points into mesh.
• -M — Does not merge coplanar facets.
• -T — Set a tolerance for coplanar test (default 1e-8).
• -d — Detect intersections of PLC facets.
• -z — Numbers all output items starting from zero.
• -j — Jettison unused vertices from output .node file.
• -o2 — Generates second-order subparametric elements.
• -f — Outputs faces (including non-boundary faces) to .face file.
• -e — Outputs subsegments to .edge file.
• -n — Outputs tetrahedra neighbors to .neigh file.
• -g — Outputs mesh to .mesh file for viewing by Medit.
• -G — Outputs mesh to .msh file for viewing by Gid.
• -O — Outputs mesh to .off file for viewing by Geomview.
• -B — Suppresses output of boundary information.
• -N — Suppresses output of .node file.
• -E — Suppresses output of .ele file.
• -F — Suppresses output of .face file.
• -I — Suppresses mesh iteration numbers.
• -C — Checks the consistency of the final mesh.
• -Q — Quiet: No terminal output except errors.
• -V — Verbose: Detailed information on what I'm doing.
• -v — Prints the version information.
• -h — Help: A brief instruction for using TetGen.

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🔥 EXAMPLES 🔥

so the wing, right? iconic little guy 🦋 it's described in two files: wing.node and wing.poly. and the command line is literally:

tetgen -pq wing

and that generates the quality mesh in three files: wing.1.node, wing.1.ele, and wing.1.face. periodt 💅

now, by default the radius-edge ratio of each tetrahedron is bounded below 2.0. but bestie, you can impose a tight bound by adding a number directly after the -q switch. like this:

tetgen -pq1.2 wing

and that generates a quality mesh which have more points inserted than the mesh created in above. so yeah, tighter bound, more points, more work, still slay ✨

want more examples? go look at http://tetgen.berlios.de/switches.examples.html 🌈

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👑 SEE ALSO 👑

• netgen (1)

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🎀 AUTHOR 🎀

This manual page was written by Ondrej Certik <ondrej@certik.cz> for the Debian system (but may be used by others). Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU General Public License, Version 2 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. 🫶

On Debian systems, the complete text of the GNU General Public License can be found in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL.

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and that's a wrap, bestie 💖 this was the TETGEN(1) page, straight outta your system's General Commands Manual — same title, same section, no cap 🧚✨ go tetrahedralize something iconic 🌈