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Evaluate Facet

In one sentence: Click any triangle on a mesh to display its index, area, normal, aspect ratio, and neighbour information.

Overview

Workbench: Mesh
Menu: Mesh → Meshes → Analyze → Evaluate Facet
Command: Mesh_EvaluateFacet
Shortcut: none

Activates a pick mode — click on any triangle in the mesh to display its properties in the Task panel.

Intuition

When you see a visual artifact or suspect a degenerate triangle in a specific mesh region, Evaluate Facet lets you click exactly that triangle to read its numerical properties — area, normal direction, neighbours — so you can decide whether it needs repair.

When to use it

  • Finding degenerate triangles with near-zero area.
  • Checking the normal direction at a specific location.
  • Investigating a region that appears wrong in the vertex curvature colour map.
  • Identifying which triangle index to reference in a repair script.

Step-by-step

  1. Select the mesh.
  2. Choose Mesh → Meshes → Analyze → Evaluate Facet.
  3. Click any triangle in the 3-D view.
  4. Read the properties in the Task panel.
  5. Press Escape or click Close to exit.

Reported properties

Property Description
Face index Triangle index in the mesh data structure
Triangle area Area of the triangle (mm²)
Normal X, Y, Z components of the outward normal
Aspect ratio Longest edge / shortest altitude (quality metric; 1.0 = equilateral)
Neighbours Indices of adjacent triangles
Neighbours' normals Normal vectors of adjacent triangles

Common mistakes and pitfalls

Aspect ratio interpretation

An aspect ratio of 1.0 is a perfect equilateral triangle. Ratios above 10–20 indicate very elongated triangles that may cause issues in FEA meshing. Ratios near infinity indicate degenerate (zero-area) triangles.

See also