We’ve already discussed the need to come up with “better” meshes for given surfaces in the context of simplification. Here we revisit that topic, but simply redefine what “better” means.
We’ll start by considering the problem of produced new triangle meshes for a given input surface.
A rather more difficult problem is to produce a good quad mesh for a given input triangulation.
The earlier paper by Alliez et al. makes a good companion to the SMI03 paper.
Here are a couple of methods that remesh the surface without constructing a global parameterization.
V. Surazhsky and C. Gotsman. Explicit surface remeshing. Proceedings of the Symposium on Mesh Processing, June 2003. [PDF]
V. Surazhsky, P. Alliez, and C. Gotsman. Isotropic remeshing of surfaces: A local parameterization approach. In Proceedings of Int’l Meshing Roundtable, 2003. [PDF]
For some alternative takes on the quad-dominant remeshing problem, here are a couple of very recent papers.