Feature-Preserving Offset Meshing

We introduce a new offset meshing method that handles clean 3D surface meshes of arbitrary geometry and topology—where “clean” refers to meshes that are watertight, manifold, and free of self-intersections. Our approach also extends to imperfect, or “dirty,” meshes that violate these conditions, although the problem becomes significantly more difficult in such scenarios, and faithful feature preservation near defective areas cannot always be assured. In contrast to prior techniques, which have largely focused on constant-radius offsets, our method is, to our knowledge, the first to support mitered offsets while effectively preserving sharp features. Our method is designed based on several core principles: 1) explicitly generating the offset vertices and triangles with feature-capturing energy and constraints; 2) prioritizing the generation of the offset geometry before establishing its connectivity, 3) employing exact algorithms in critical pipeline steps for robustness, balancing the use of floating-point computations for efficiency, 4) applying various conservative speed up strategies including early reject non-contributing computations to the final output. Our approach further uniquely supports variable offset distances on input surface elements, offering a wider range of practical applications compared to conventional methods. For benchmarking purposes, we performed an extensive comparison against state-of-the-art offset methods using a curated subset of the Thingi10K dataset. Our results demonstrate the superiority of our approach over current state-of-the-art methods in terms of element count, feature preservation, and non-uniform offset distances of the resulting offset mesh surfaces, marking a significant advancement in the field.