Planar Hexagonal Meshing for Architecture

Mesh surfaces with planar hexagonal faces, what we refer to as PH meshes, offer an elegant way of paneling freeform architectural surfaces due to their node simplicity (i.e., valence-3 nodes) and naturally appealing layout. We investigate PH meshes to understand how the shape, size, and pattern of PH faces are constrained by surface geometry. This understanding enables us to develop an effective method for paneling freeform architectural surfaces with PH meshes. Our method first constructs an ideal triangulation of a given smooth surface, guided by surface geometry. We show that such an ideal triangulation leads to a Dupin-regular PH mesh via tangent duality on the surface. We have developed several novel and effective techniques for improving undesirable mesh layouts caused by singular behaviors of surface curvature. We compute support structures associated with PH meshes, including exact vertex offsets and approximate edge offsets, as demanded in panel manufacturing. The efficacy of our method is validated by a number of architectural examples.