Regular hexahedron tessellation algorithm for 3d complex entity models with inside cavities

3D entity model with the data structure of regular hexahedron, which is usually called as 3D regular block model, is now widely used in many domains such as resources estimation (RE) and finite element analysis (FEA) etc. In these domains, each regular hexahedron element of a 3D entity should be respectively evaluated with spatial related properties. However, 3D entity models are usually constructed from limit and sparse geometrical elements such as feature points and contour line strings, so these models are usually represented only with connected triangles as their surface but nothing in their hollow interior. We need a method to tessellate these models into regular blocks and fill the hollow interior with them. This paper mainly introduces an effective tessellation algorithm for converting 3D wireframe models which are represented as a collection of surface triangles to 3D regular block models which are represented as a collection of regular hexahedrons. With this algorithm, both simple 3D entity model with single outside boundary and complex 3D entity model with inside cavities can be tessellated into a collection of regular hexahedrons, which are constrained to the inside and outside boundaries of 3D entities. We have developed a test application for resources estimation based on this algorithm. A gold ore-body wire-frame model is tessellated into regular hexahedrons. The inverse distance weighting (IDW) interpolation method is used to evaluate each regular hexahedron with gold grade. The 3D block model of this gold ore-body is visualized with Au-grade distribution information.