Octree Encoding of B-rep Based Objects

An octree representation of a solid is useful in applications such as finite element mesh generation, robot path planning and NC path generation. It consists of approximating the solid by variably sized cubes (octants). Since most solid modellers store the boundary representation (B-Rep) of objects, an algorithm for converting the B-Rep of the object to its octree representation will be useful in applications involving octree representation. This paper describes an algorithm for computing octree approximation of an object given its facetted B-Rep. An earlier effort classifies the octant with respect to the object to obtain the octree approximation. The algorithm proposed in this paper classifies the object entities with respect to the octant (cube). The simple structure of cubes can therefore be exploited to either totally avoid or reduce considerably, expensive operations to realize an efficient algorithm