Diamond Hierarchies of Arbitrary Dimension

Nested simplicial meshes generated by the simplicial bisection decomposition proposed by Maubach [Mau95] have been widely used in 2D and 3D as multi-resolution models of terrains and three-dimensional scalar fields, They are an alternative to octree representation since they allow generating crack-free representations of the underlying field. On the other hand, this method generates conforming meshes only when all simplices sharing the bisection edge are subdivided concurrently. Thus, efficient representations have been proposed in 2D and 3D based on a clustering of the simplices sharing a common longest edge in what is called a diamond. These representations exploit the regularity of the vertex distribution and the diamond structure to yield an implicit encoding of the hierarchical and geometric relationships among the triangles and tetrahedra, respectively. Here, we analyze properties of d-dimensional diamonds to better understand the hierarchical and geometric relationships among the simplices generated by Maubach’s bisection scheme and derive closed-form equations for the number of vertices, simplices, parents and children of each type of diamond. We exploit these properties to yield an implicit pointerless representation for d-dimensional diamonds and reduce the number of required neighbor-finding accesses from O(d!) to O(d).