Point Cloud Generation for Meshfree Methods: An Overview

Meshfree methods are becoming an increasingly popular alternative to mesh-based methods of numerical simulation. The biggest stated advantage of meshfree methods is the avoidance of generating a mesh on the computational domain. However, even today a surprisingly large amount of meshfree literature ironically uses the nodes of a mesh as the point set that discretizes the domain. On the other hand, already existing efficient meshfree methods to generate point clouds are apparently not very well known among meshfree communities, which has led to recent work redeveloping existing algorithms. In this paper, we present a brief overview of point cloud generation methods for domains and surfaces and discuss their features and challenges, in particular in the context of applicability to industry-relevant complex geometries.