How to assemble contiguous shapes into one shape?
Hello,
I would like to construct a large surface by piecing together smaller surfaces. The problem I have is I am unable to work out how to assemble these smaller surfaces into a single surface, which means that the mesh I get is very dense as gmsh places nodes and elements along the boundary of each small surface.
The openCASCADE documentation states that assembling contiguous shapes into one shape should be done using the BRepBuilderAPI_Sewing Class (https://dev.opencascade.org/doc/refman/html/class_b_rep_builder_a_p_i___sewing.html). Gmsh appears to only provide access to this class through the following functions, neither of which do what I hope: gmsh::model::occ::healShapes() gmsh::model::occ::addSurfaceLoop()
Referring to the gmsh source code, it appears the limitation of the healShapes() function is that it treats all dimTags it is passed individually, so I can't pass it all the dimTags of my smaller surfaces in the hope that it will sew them all together to form and return one large surface. In contrast, the addSurfaceLoop() function does appear to sew surfaces together, but it is for the purposes of creating a shell, which does not appear as a shape in the gmsh geometry that is meshed (and, in any case, the gmsh documentation states this function is meant for closed surface loops, and my surface isn't closed, not that gmsh seemed to complain).
I have also tried using gmsh::model::occ::fuse(), but this appears to do nothing, which I guess is because the surfaces have no overlap, but rather just share a common edge.
Is there a way to do this that I have missed/overlooked?
Many thanks, Stephen