Volume decimation (QEM tet-edge collapse)

meshioplusplus.decimate_volume(mesh, ratio=0.25) reduces a tetrahedral mesh's cell count by greedy quadric-error-metric tet-edge collapse. It is the volume-mesh sibling of decimate — a separate operation, not a mode on it: decimate keeps raising by name on any 3D volume block, pointing here, and this operation never touches decimate's own machinery. Like the other mesh operations, it uses only standard C++, so it runs under every mesh backend.

import meshioplusplus

mesh = meshioplusplus.read("solid.vtu")

# keep 25% of the tets
coarse = meshioplusplus.decimate_volume(mesh, ratio=0.25)

# or stop at an absolute tet count / an error budget
coarse = meshioplusplus.decimate_volume(mesh, target_cells=5000)
coarse = meshioplusplus.decimate_volume(mesh, max_error=1e-6)

coarse, report = meshioplusplus.decimate_volume(
    mesh, ratio=0.25, return_report=True
)
print(report["tets_removed"], report["collapses_rejected"])

Both CLIs expose it as a verb:

meshioplusplus decimate-volume solid.vtu coarse.vtu --ratio 0.25
meshioplusplus decimate-volume solid.vtu coarse.vtu --target-cells 5000 --placement midpoint

Boundary vertices participate

Unlike decimate, whose preserve_boundary defaults on (boundary vertices never move), decimate_volume's preserve_boundary defaults off — boundary vertices are scored and collapsed by a real quadric-error objective, exactly like every other vertex. Pass preserve_boundary=True to reproduce decimate's own pinned-boundary behaviour instead.

The algorithm in a paragraph

Every vertex accumulates a Garland–Heckbert plane quadric — but only from its incident boundary triangles (the mesh's own outer skin, found via the mesh's owner/neighbour face dual). A purely interior vertex, by construction, touches no boundary triangle at all, so its quadric is the exact zero matrix, not merely small. For a candidate edge (a, b) the combined quadric Q(a) + Q(b) feeds the same placement solve decimate uses:

• if at least one endpoint touches the boundary, Q_ab is non-degenerate (or the solve's own ill-conditioning bound routes it to the midpoint) — identical to decimate's own code path;
• if both endpoints are purely interior, Q_ab is exactly zero, which that same bound classifies as degenerate and falls back to the midpoint — no interior-specific placement logic is needed at all.

Scoring needs one explicit split, though: a quadric error evaluated against an exact-zero quadric is identically zero for every interior-interior edge, which would tie the whole interior of the mesh and fall through to id order rather than a useful ordering. Every candidate therefore carries a regime: 0 (boundary-touching, scored by real quadric error) or 1 (purely interior, scored by squared edge length) — regime-0 collapses are always considered ahead of regime-1 ones in the greedy queue.

Scope: tets in, tets out

The operating type is tetra, exclusively. Everything else raises by name rather than guessing:

• a non-tetra 3D volume cell (hexahedron, wedge, pyramid) or a polyhedron/ragged block points at convert_cells(mode="simplexify");
• any non-3D block mixed in with the tets (its nodes would dangle after the collapse) points at dropping it first, e.g. via split.

The block structure stays 1:1 with the input (a block may come back with zero cells).

Stopping criteria

Exactly one of the three must be given:

criterion	meaning
ratio	fraction of the tets to KEEP, in (0, 1]
target_cells	absolute tet count to stop at
max_error	collapse only while the cheapest boundary-touching candidate's quadric error is at most this (squared mesh units)

max_error is only strictly meaningful for regime-0 (boundary-touching) entries — real quadric-error units. Compared directly against a regime-1 entry's squared edge length it is a documented rough tool for mixed meshes, not a claimed exact criterion; ratio/target_cells are regime-agnostic and remain exactly well-defined either way. A collapse removes every tet sharing the edge (one or more), so ratio/target_cells land within one collapse of the request. When pinning leaves no collapsible edge before the target is reached, the run warns and returns normally.

Placement, and how data follows

placement= decides where the surviving vertex goes — optimal (default, the quadric minimizer, midpoint when ill-conditioned or purely interior), midpoint, or endpoint (the endpoint with the lower quadric error) — exactly decimate's own three modes, reused unchanged. A boundary vertex's quadric is built from boundary-triangle planes only, so its minimizer naturally stays near the surface.

Float-kind point_data at the survivor is blended between the two endpoints at the clamped edge-projection parameter, exactly as decimate does. Integer point_data keeps the survivor's own value. Each surviving tet keeps its own cell_data row; field_data passes through; named regions (and so point_sets/cell_sets) are carried by the C++ core itself — Point and Cell regions survive, named Side regions do not (a removed tet's local facet numbering has no correspondence to the survivor's).

What is pinned

Mirroring decimate's vocabulary, a pinned vertex never moves and is never removed:

• preserve_boundary (default off, see above) — every boundary vertex, by the once-used-face test on the mesh's own outer skin.
• preserve_features (default on, feature_angle=30) — the endpoints of every feature edge of the boundary skin: an edge whose two boundary triangles' normals differ by more than the angle, keeping corners and creases of the outer surface sharp (a per-edge test since v16.23.0, shared with decimate and smooth).
• frozen — an optional index array, or the name of one of mesh.point_sets.

Validity guards

Tet-only, so simpler than the general 3D case: a tet's other incident cells are exactly the tets shared by both endpoints. Each guard rejects the individual collapse (counted in the report's collapses_rejected) rather than aborting:

• the vertex-link condition — the exact set of nodes adjacent to both endpoints (via their own incident tets) must equal the "opposite corners" of every shared tet — pure integer set equality, no floating point;
• the duplicate-tet guard — no surviving tet incident to one endpoint alone may share its "opposite triangle" with a surviving tet incident to the other endpoint alone (which would otherwise produce two tets with identical corners);
• tet-inversion rejection (smooth's "do no harm") — a surviving tet whose signed volume is non-zero must not change sign under the candidate placement; an already-degenerate tet imposes no constraint.

Boundary-touching collapses additionally run decimate's own ring/shared-face link condition and normal-flip check, over the mesh's own outer skin — so the boundary surface cannot tear, pinch or fold independently of the interior guards above.

Determinism

Setup is parallel with a fixed floating-point order, matching decimate's own; the greedy loop is serial, driven by a priority queue with lazy version-stamped deletion. This operation is C++-core only, with no numpy fallback at all — like subdivide/agglomerate and unlike decimate itself. The volume-specific validity guards sit on top of the mesh's own outer skin, whose incremental maintenance through hundreds of collapses is exactly the kind of intricate bookkeeping a second, independently written implementation would risk silently diverging from. Calling decimate_volume without the compiled meshioplusplus._core extension raises NotImplementedError naming the reason.

Other language surfaces

• C API — mio_decimate_volume(...) returning an opaque mio_decimate_volume_result (mesh borrow/take, zero-copy point/cell maps, counter getters) — its own result type, distinct from mio_decimate_result. The frozen mask is not exposed across the C ABI (a documented flat-ABI gap, like mio_decimate's own).
• CLI — the decimate-volume verb in both the Python and the native CLI (see CLI); --preserve-boundary is an opt-in flag here (the opposite of decimate's opt-out --no-preserve-boundary).
• Pipeline — a DecimateVolume step ({Ratio, TargetCells, MaxError, Placement, PreserveBoundary, PreserveFeatures, FeatureAngle}), dispatched generically off the shared op table.
• MCP — the decimate_volume tool.
• WASM — decimateVolume(mesh, ratio, targetCells, maxError, placement, preserveBoundary, preserveFeatures, featureAngle, frozen, returnMaps) → {mesh, tetsRemoved, pointsRemoved, collapsesRejected, maxErrorApplied} (frozen: an optional array of 0-based point ids to pin outright; an out-of-range id throws naming it; returnMaps: also attaches pointMap/cellMaps); also reachable as a pipeline step, {op: 'decimateVolume', ...} in convertSurfaceOps or DecimateVolume in runPipeline. See the WebAssembly reference.

The returned maps make the result composable: point_map sends every input point to its survivor's output index (collapsed points map to the survivor, not −1), and the per-input-block cell_maps send each input cell to its own output index, or −1 when it did not survive.