splitFV - Partition a mesh into its connected components.

Splits a 2D or 3D mesh defined by faces and vertices into separately connected mesh pieces. [2025 update for vastly faster performance]

SPLITFV Partition a mesh into its connected components.

FVARRAY = SPLITFV(FV) - FV is a struct with .faces and .vertices

FVARRAY = SPLITFV(F, V) - F is faces matrix, V is vertices matrix

FVARRAY = SPLITFV(TR) - TR is a MATLAB triangulation object

DESCRIPTION:

Connectivity is determined by mapping vertices to "nodes" in a graph.

By default, connectivity is strict (index-based), but can be adjusted

to weld vertices that are spatially coincident but indexed separately.

NAME-VALUE OPTIONS:

Tolerance - Determines how vertices are "connected" into a graph:

NaN (Default): Strict index connectivity. Only faces

sharing the exact same vertex index are connected.

0: Exact spatial connectivity. Vertices at identical

[x,y,z] coordinates are treated as shared nodes.

>0: Fuzzy spatial connectivity. Vertices within this

Euclidean distance are treated as shared nodes.

Note: Original node counts will not change - Tolerance

values only affects how meshes are split

EXAMPLE:

fullpatch.vertices = [2 4; 2 8; 8 4; 8 0; 0 4; 2 6; 2 2; 4 2; 4 0; 5 2; 5 0];

fullpatch.faces = [1 2 3; 1 3 4; 5 6 1; 7 8 9; 11 10 4];

tiledlayout(2,1);

nexttile;

patch('Faces',fullpatch.faces,'Vertices',fullpatch.vertices,'FaceColor','r');

title('Unsplit Mesh'); axis tight equal; grid on;

splitpatch = splitFV(fullpatch);

nexttile; hold on;

colours = lines(length(splitpatch));

for i=1:length(splitpatch)

patch(splitpatch(i),'FaceColor',colours(i,:));

end

title('Split Mesh'); view(2); axis tight equal; grid on;