Creating a surface tessellation from points and radii

Hello, thanks for reading this,

Using your help I managed to build my binary tree very well. I managed to write my MATLAB writers and readers and much of my parser on my own as a result.

For the record, the data I have now is point and connectivity data, along with the radius for each connection. It is not inherently cylindrical, but is implied to be cylindrical. Here is a OpenGL screenshots of my lines and connections: http://imgur.com/gfslR

Now something I would like to do is tessellate my cylindrical data so I can export it as a STL. I checked online, and saw there were STL writers for surfaces, so would the best way for me to go about this is to try to convert it to a series of cylinder surfaces, then use this to export the surfaces as a single STL?

In the meantime, I will explore with the NURBS toolbox to see if I can create a network of clinders from my data.

Thank you for your help!

[Geoff]

Do you need to create a continuous surface as opposed to just a bunch of disjointed cylinders? If your angles are small, it's usually enough to simply calculate a cylinder around each line and join it to the next, using nothing but triangles. Is this essentially what you are trying to do? It gets a bit complicated when you branch, but I'm sure there would be a reasonable simplification given that the branching is always binary.

[Brian]

I plan on doing the smoothing and joining on Ansys, because that is what Ansys is best at.

If I could just create a long series of disjointed clinders and encode it into an STL in MATLAB, that would be enough.