Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!haven!purdue!decwrl!labrea!csli!rustcat
From: rustcat@csli.STANFORD.EDU (Vallury Prabhakar)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics
Subject: Re: distributing points on a surface
Message-ID: <7387@csli.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: 1 Feb 89 22:26:40 GMT
References: <1163@psuhcx.psu.edu> <2528@antique.UUCP>
Reply-To: rustcat@csli.UUCP (Vallury Prabhakar)
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 29


In article <1163@psuhcx.psu.edu> sbj@psuhcx (Sanjay B. Joshi) writes:

# Does any body out there know of any algorithms capable of distributing a
# given number of points on a planar/curved surface in a uniform manner, where
# uniform could be defined such that no two points are closer than a given 
# value.
# 
# The planar/curved surface is bounded and non convex.
# 
# For example, given 50 points how does one distribute them on an L shaped
# polygon, such that the distribution is fairly uniform.

You might considering using an automatic mesh generator for Finite Element
methods to do this.  You would need only to generate the nodes and not the
elements.  There are a number of approaches described in various
journals, and if you're interested I could send you a reference list.  A
good starting paper is,

Title:    Automatic Finite-Element Mesh generation from Geometric models - 
          A point-based approach.
Authors:  Y. T. Lee, A. De Pennington and N. K. Shaw
Journal:  ACM Transactions on Graphics, Vol. 3, No. 4, Oct. 1984, pp 287-311.

Planar polygons that are made up of straight line edges are relatively easy
to mesh, while curved portions of the boundary are slightly more complex.

Enjoy.

							-- Vallury Prabhakar