We present a nov­el ap­proach to remesh a sur­face in­to an iso­trop­ic tri­an­gu­lar or quad-dom­in­ant mesh us­ing a uni­fied loc­al smooth­ing op­er­at­or that op­tim­izes both the edge ori­ent­a­tions and ver­tex po­s­i­tions in the out­put mesh. Our al­gorithm pro­duces meshes with high iso­tropy while nat­ur­ally align­ing and snap­ping edges to sharp fea­tures. The meth­od is simple to im­ple­ment and par­al­lel­ize, and it can pro­cess a vari­ety of in­put sur­face rep­res­ent­a­tions, such as point clouds, range scans and tri­angle meshes. Our full pipeline ex­ecutes in­stantly (less than a second) on meshes with hun­dreds of thou­sands of faces, en­abling new types of in­ter­act­ive work­flows. Since our al­gorithm avoids any glob­al op­tim­iz­a­tion, and its key steps scale lin­early with in­put size, we are able to pro­cess ex­tremely large meshes and point clouds, with sizes ex­ceed­ing sev­er­al hun­dred mil­lion ele­ments. To demon­strate the ro­bust­ness and ef­fect­ive­ness of our meth­od, we ap­ply it to hun­dreds of mod­els of vary­ing com­plex­ity and provide our cross-plat­form ref­er­ence im­ple­ment­a­tion in the sup­ple­ment­al ma­ter­i­al.

News: Since ver­sion 10.2, Modo uses the In­stant Meshes al­gorithm to im­ple­ment its auto­mat­ic re­to­po­logy fea­ture. An in­ter­view dis­cuss­ing this tech­nique and more re­cent pro­jects is avail­able here.