A systematic approach to tetrahedral element or mesh generation, based on an advancing-front method and an optimal triangular mesh generation technique on the surface, is presented in this paper. The possible internal nodes are obtained by the octree-decomposition scheme. The initial tetrahedral mesh system is constructed by the advancing-front method and then it is improved by the quality improvement processes including mesh swapping and nodal smoothing. The approach is evaluated by investigating the normalized length, the normalized volume, the dihedral angle and the normalized quality