Scan and Solve: Acquiring the Physics of Artifacts

Existing physical artifacts including sculpture, mechanical parts, and anatomical structures are commonly acquired by modern surface and volumetric scanning technologies for archival, visualization, and diagnostic purposes. While the native representations for such data are largely sufficient for visualization purposes, more advanced field simulation currently requires extensive manual conversions into simplified surface and volume meshes compatible with the traditional finite element analysis pipeline. These conversions are tedious, error-prone, and require expertise in the mesh construction process. We demonstrate automated field simulation on acquired artifacts, bypassing the difficult geometric and topological meshing problems through a meshfree paradigm based on approximate distance fields computed from the native acquired data through sampling.