Voxelization of only the surface of an STL mesh

[venugovh]

Hi,

I am trying to voxelize a very small feature stl mesh. The stl mesh is rather large in size. So to capture the small features, I ended up using a small value of the density parameter. The two images below show that when I voxelize the mesh I lose the feature circled in red. When I reduce the voxel size further, I run into memory error due to large NumPy arrays and also it takes a lot of time. One option is for me to only voxelize the surface of the mesh.

Issue #386 seems to talk about surface only voxelization. But this approach involves first creating the bulk voxels and then extracting the surface voxels from the bulk.

Is there a way to directly voxelize only the surface of a mesh? I am currently using the pyvista.voxelize(mesh, density) function.

Thanks!

[adamgranthendry]

@Vysakh5391 My first suggestion would be to see if you can further subdivide your mesh for the smallest mandrel you have circled. Not knowing more about the voxelization algorithm, I wonder if it is impacted by the size and shape of your meshed input data?

[venugovh]

@adamgranthendry Thank you for your response. Since the subdividing the mesh/voxel to capture the smallest feature size is a memory heavy method, I am looking for a way to voxelize only the surface of the mesh and not the bulk.