Molecular Surface Mesh Smoothing with Subdivision

Smoothing with subdivision has several popular techniques. However, these techniques have several limitations including mesh deformation, no care of mesh quality, and increasing mesh complexity. Molecular meshes having a distinct surface with abrupt changes from concave to convex and vice versa are further challenging for these techniques. In this paper, we formulated a smoothing algorithm for molecular surface meshes. This algorithm integrates the advantages of three well-known algorithms including Catmull-Clarck, Loop, and Centroidal Voronoi tessellation (CVT) with an error control module. CVT is used for pre-processing, and the remaining two for smoothing. We find new vertices like Catmull-Clarck and connect them like Loop. Unlike Catmull-Clark, which is generating a quad mesh, we establish a new connection making it triangular. We control the geometric loss by backward translation of the vertices toward the input mesh. We compared the results with previous methods and tested the algorithm with different numerical analysis and modeling applications. We found our results with significant improvements and always robust for downstream applications.