AbstractConstructing well‐behaved Laplacian and mass matrices is essential for tetrahedral mesh processing. Unfortunately, the de facto standard linear finite elements exhibit bias on tetrahedralized regular grids, motivating the development of finite‐volume methods. In this paper, we place existing methods into a common construction, showing how their differences amount to the choice of simplex centers. These choices lead to satisfaction or breakdown of important properties: continuity with respect to vertex positions, positive semi‐definiteness of the implied Dirichlet energy, positivity of the mass matrix, and unbiased‐ness on regular grids. Based on this analysis, we propose a new method for constructing dual‐volumes which explicitly satisfy all of these properties via convex optimization.