clipping intersecting mesh of lesser importance?

[myociss]

I have two intersecting surface meshes representing different materials that I need to repair, with one mesh (mesh A) representing the more important material and the other (mesh B) representing the less important one. If I find all faces of mesh B that intersect mesh A using the Polygon_mesh_processing library, is there some straightforward way to then clip these faces of mesh B so that the region inside mesh A is removed, i.e. some function that will return new faces of mesh B as clipped by mesh A? Thanks so much in advance!

[sloriot]

did you try to use the PMP::clip function? Could you share one such example?

[myociss]

Great, this looks very close to what I want, however I would like to keep the part of mesh B that is outside A rather than inside. Is this possible?

[MaelRL]

If your meshes are both bounding volumes, you can use PMP::corefine_and_compute_difference; otherwise, you can use PMP::split and identify the connected component(s) that you must discard by checking if it's within A using (for example) CGAL::Side_of_triangle_mesh.

[myociss]

Oh okay, it looks like you're saying split() will divide mesh B into components that are completely inside of or completely outside of mesh A, and then I can simply discard the components that are inside mesh A. If so, that will work perfectly, thank you!