Gmsh extrude curved 2d mesh in normal direction
 

Hi All,

Would anyone know if it’s possible to generate a hexagonal/pentagonal surface tessellation of a sphere?

I’d like to be able to generate a sphere, tessellate the surface in hexagons/pentagons, then extrude the surface out in the normal direction to create a mesh of high order prisms.

I'd basically like to generate soccer ball shell of non-zero thickness.

I've figured out how to extrude a curved surface mesh in its normal direction, so I know how to generate spherical shell of prisms. In case anyone else has this question, the Extrude command like:

Extrude{Surface{14,-16, -18, 20, 22, -24, -26, 28};Layers{{1},{4.0}}; Recombine;}

takes care of it. Here, 14,-16, -18, 20, 22, -24, -26, 28 are the identifiers of my 8 spherical mesh octants, some are negative because their normals points in a different direction than the others. This creates a single layer, 4 units thick, and the Recombine nicely aligns the inner and outer meshes so that the volume mesh consists of prisms oriented radially outward from the sphere center.

Now, If I could just figure out how to control the surface mesh tessellation so that it chooses hexagons and pentagons instead of triangles and quads.

Thanks