3D mesh to particle cloud conversion

I need to convert arbitrary triangulated 3D mesh to cloud of particles that are uniformly spaced. First thought was to try find a way to fill one 3D triangle. And then fill each triangle of mesh, removing duplicated particles on edges, but that's just hard and too much work. I was hoping for some more-math way.

Can anyone point me to an algorithm which can 开发者_高级运维help me do my task correctly... well, at least approximatively?

Thanks

There are two main options:

• Voxelization of mesh. Easy to implement the conversion of mesh to voxels, but it's inaccurate since uniform spacing cannot be achieved: distance between cubes can be x, x*sqrt(2) or x*sqrt(3) depending if neighbor cubes are in same plane and adjacent.

• Poisson disk sampling on surface. Hard to implement and lack of research material and code, but mathematically very correct. Some links:

  http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=135760

  http://web.mysites.ntu.edu.sg/cwfu/public/Shared%20Documents/dualtiling/index.html

You could convert the TIN to raster using a GIS package or software such as R, then retrieve one point at the center of each pixel representing the value. (Example in ArcGIS)

EDIT: If the irregular 3D mesh has multiple heights per {x, y} a similar approach would be to sample the mesh using a voxel "grid" and keep one value per voxel. GRASS GIS has the functionality to take the vertices of the TIN (3d mesh) and convert them to voxels, then back to a regular 3d cloud.