Abstract: Triangular mesh surfaces are widely used in a variety of situations. Unfortunately, there often exist unwanted holes in many mesh surfaces. The existence of these holes makes it difficult for us to carry out some operations on mesh surfaces, such as rapid prototyping, finite element analysis, etc. It is therefore necessary to repair the holes. In this paper, we put forward a hole repairing algorithm. By iteratively searching the adjacent edges which have the smallest angle, new triangles are constructed, and the hole polygon are refreshed until the newly generated triangles completely fill the holes. In the algorithm, the character plane of the hole polygon is introduced for the validity verification of the new generated triangles. Practical examples show that the proposed algorithm is effective.

Key words: rapid prototyping, mesh surface, hole repairing, reverse engineering