Jul 24, 2015 -- The upcoming release of Polygonica from MachineWorks Ltd will include functionality for automatic feature recognition on polygonal solids.
There are many CAD models in use that have lost their original surface data. Loss of surface information often occurs when the CAD output is tessellated into a mesh. The problem is that many processes subsequent to mesh conversion require the surface data that has been lost.
Polygonica has introduced functionality capable of regenerating the original surface information from just the triangulated data.

The feature detection algorithm takes in the mesh information and returns automatically the surface parameterisation of the feature, as well as surface area, bounding box, and error values.

Geometric features detected include planes, spheres, cones, cylinder and torii. Boundaries around features can also be determined and queried, allowing the application to tell which features are adjacent to other features.

David Knight, Polygonica Sales Manager at MachineWorks Ltd says, "The results speak for themselves. For polygonal meshes originally derived from CAD models, Polygonica feature detection is able to quickly and accurately determine a set of geometric features. This could provide a crucial first step in many tasks such as reverse engineering, remeshing and automation."

The following results are from real machining test pieces: 

Test Piece 1

Solid has 5776 triangles. Found 58 features in 0.63 seconds.

• 34 planes
• 0 spheres
• 22 cylinders
• 2 cones
• 0 tori

Test Piece 2

Solid has 6156 triangles. Found 41 features in 1.94 seconds.

• 26 planes
• 0 spheres
• 15 cylinders
• 0 cones
• 0 tori

Test Piece 3

Solid has 271582 triangles. Found 6368 features in 80.63 seconds.

• 3469 planes
• 153 spheres
• 1612 cylinders
• 931 cones
• 203 tori