CGAL users discussion list

["mturner" <>]

Hello,

I am seeking advice on how to use CGAL to create a 2D surface mesh in 3D space
from a set of measured points over a region on the surface of the Earth.

We have a set of a few thousand measured locations within a bounding box of
approximately 5000 km by 2000 km.
At this large scale the curvature of the Earth becomes important, and so we
would like to create thin 2D mesh within 3D space.

(For smaller, local regions we have used Latitude and Longitude coordinates,
and
the methods described in Chapter 46 2D Conforming Triangulations and Meshes)

I've been reading through the CGAL online manuals,
and from the various examples in Chapters 47, 48, 50, 57,
it looks like all the functions are designed to work with implicit functions
and/or medical image data.

I'm trying to understand which of these methods will work with a discrete set
of points,
representing the case where the surface is not closed into a solid shape
(like the examples of a full sphere, the skull, and elephant shapes),
but rather a 'partial patch' or sub-region, of the Earth's surface.

Thanks for any help or guidance you can provide,

Mark Turner
California Institute of Technology
Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences