Surface Evolver An interactive program for the study of surfaces shaped by surface tension and other energies, and subject to various constraints
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Surface Evolver Description

The Surface Evolver was designed to be an interactive program for the study of surfaces shaped by surface tension and other energies, and subject to various constraints. A surface is implemented as a simplicial complex, that is, a union of triangles. The user defines an initial surface in a datafile. The Evolver evolves the surface toward minimal energy by a gradient descent method. The aim can be to find a minimal energy surface, or to model the process of evolution by mean curvature. The energy in the Evolver can be a combination of surface tension, gravitational energy, squared mean curvature, user-defined surface integrals, or knot energies. The Evolver can handle arbitrary topology (as seen in real soap bubble clusters), volume constraints, boundary constraints, boundary contact angles, prescribed mean curvature, crystalline integrands, gravity, and constraints expressed as surface integrals. The surface can be in an ambient space of arbitrary dimension, which can have a Riemannian metric, and the ambient space can be a quotient space under a group action. The user can interactively modify the surface to change its properties or to keep the evolution well-behaved. The Evolver was written for one and two dimensional surfaces, but it can do higher dimensional surfaces with some restrictions on the features available. Graphical output is available as screen graphics and in several file formats, including PostScript.

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