www.elsevier.com/locate/comgeo Meshing skin surfaces with certified topology

Skin surfaces are used for the visualization of molecules. They form a class of tangent continuous surfaces defined in terms of a set of balls (the atoms of the molecule) and a shrink factor. More recently, skin surfaces have been used for approximation purposes. We present an algorithm that approximates a skin surface with a topologically correct mesh. The complexity of the mesh is linear in the size of the Delaunay triangulation of the balls, which is worst case optimal. We also adapt two existing refinement algorithms to improve the quality of the mesh and show that the same algorithm can be used for meshing a union of balls