POINTS is based on the equation of meshing for spiral bevel gears. POINTS uses machine tool settings to solve for an NxM mesh of points on four surfaces: pinion concave and convex, and gear concave and convex. POINTS creates an ASCII file containing NxM points for each surface (N is the number of node points along the length of the tooth, and M is nodes on the height).

PAT reads this ASCII file and creates a file consisting of a series of PATRAN input commands. In addition to the mesh density on the tooth face, additional user specified variables are the number of finite elements through the tooth thickness and the number of finite elements along the tooth full fillet. A full fillet is assumed to exist for both the pinion and gear.