trimesh2 is a C++ library and set of utilities for input, output, and basic manipulation of 3D triangle meshes. The goals of the code are ease of use and efficiency, possibly at the expense of some generality.

Features

The library includes the following:

• Support for reading PLY, OFF, 3DS, and Wavefront OBJ files, together with a few other formats of mostly local interest (SM, RAY).
• Support for writing PLY, OFF, and OBJ files.
• Vec: a templated C++ class for constant-length vectors, with support for the usual arithmetic operations (add, subtract, componentwise multiply and divide, dot product, cross product, etc.)
• XForm: a class for rigid-body transformations.
• An OpenGL trackball/arcball implementation, with automatic selection of rotation center.
• Algorithms for subdivision, smoothing, curvature estimation, triangle stripping, and various other simple mesh manipulations.

Bundled together with the library are:

• Bernd Gärtner's "miniball" code for efficient exact bounding sphere computation
• A version of the "freeglut" library, an open source GLUT replacement
• GLUI, a user interface library that sits on top of OpenGL, hence is portable to many different systems

In addition, the following utility programs are included:

• mesh_view: a simple 3D mesh viewer
• mesh_make: create arbitrarily-tessellated meshes of various simple shapes
• mesh_filter: applies a variety of simple transformations to a mesh, such as converting formats, flipping faces, subdivision, smoothing, rigid-body transformations, etc.
• mesh_cc: list and/or extract connected components from a mesh
• mesh_cat: combine several meshes into a single file
• mesh_align: align 2 meshes using ICP
• mesh_shade: a few procedural shaders for adding per-vertex color
• mesh_check: check for some kinds of topological oddities (e.g., more than 2 faces at an edge) in a mesh file. Removes parts of the mesh to "clean it up" and leave it a manifold.
• mesh_crunch: quick-n-dirty mesh decimation using the Rossignac-Borrel method of vertex collapse
• mesh_info: print out some information about a mesh
• xf: create or compose transformations in .xf files

The library is distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 2. The various libraries distributed with trimesh2 are open source, and are believed to be covered by GPL-compatible licenses. Please see the COPYING file.

The code is written in C++, and is known to compile using a recent (4.x) version of g++ on several Unix-like OSes (Linux x86 and x86-64, Solaris, Mac OSX). Compiling under Windows is possible using Cygwin or MinGW32. Anecdotally, the code compiles with MS Visual Studio .NET or later (not MSVC 6), but I am not able to support this – you're on your own. (However, I will gladly accept patches that fix compilation, and will consider patches that squash warnings.)

Warning: some gcc versions are known to miscompile trimesh2.
Please avoid version 4.1.2, or anything earlier than 4.0.1.

The author of trimesh2 is Szymon Rusinkiewicz.

Download

• trimesh2-2.9.zip
• trimesh2-2.9.tar.gz
• MSVC version, courtesy of Daniel Vlasic: trimesh2-2.9-MSVC.rar
• Older versions...

Both of these packages include source, as well as Linux (32- and 64-bit), Windows, and Darwin binaries.

Changes

The most recent version is 2.9

Changes since version 2.8:

• New utilities: mesh_check, mesh_crunch, mesh_info, and xf
• Many small bugfixes, as well as fixes for compilation errors and warnings
• Bugfixes for OpenMP directives
• Componentwise functions (trigonometric, etc.) for Vec
• Colorspace conversion for Color
• The dist shader of mesh_shade now takes an absolute distance scale, instead of auto-scaling. (This is useful much more frequently than the previous behavior.)
• mesh_view now uses glArrayElement instead of glDrawElements on Intel cards. This provides a considerable speedup on the machines available to me.
• Provides the ability to install hooks (e.g. for GUI applications) for status/warning/error messages printed by trimesh2
• Includes Darwin binaries

Changes since version 2.7:

• Many compilation, portability, and bug fixes
• Colors are now stored as floats - this will require updating external code that uses trimesh2
• Support for maintaining range grids as grids, instead of automatically converting to meshes upon read
• Rudimentary (possibly broken, incomplete) support for reading VVD files
• mesh_filter: Added bilateral mesh filtering using the method of [Jones et al. 2003]
• mesh_make: Added Klein bottle, rhombic triacontahedron
• OpenMP directives in a few places for multi-threading
• Many functions moved from utilities into library

Changes since version 2.6:

• Miscellaneous compilation, portability, and bug fixes
• mesh_filter: Added -pcasnap; added -fly (butterfly subdivision); more robust -orient
• mesh_make: Added trefoil knot
• Linux x86_64 libraries and binaries now go in lib.Linux64/ and bin.Linux64/

Changes since version 2.5:

• mesh_filter: Added -sharpen and -usmooth flags; bugfixes for Mac compilation, transforming meshes with normals
• mesh_make: Fix for making cubes with tess = 1
• mesh_align: ICP with isotropic or anisotropic (affine) scale
• mesh_cat: Bugfix in handling normals, colors, etc.
• mesh_shade: Added a few shaders, including coloring based on mesh-to-mesh distance

• Fixed bug in curvature computation
• Small bugfix in mesh_view
• Compile fixes
• Added mesh_shade with a few procedural shaders

Changes since version 2.3:

• Added mesh_align
• XForm.h and some of the utility programs should now support affine transforms (as opposed to just rigid-body)
• Added yet more options to mesh_filter

Changes since version 2.2:

• Bugfix in file I/O

Changes since version 2.1:

• Added a couple of options to mesh_filter
• Bugfix for depth readback on ATI cards with broken drivers

Changes since version 2.0:

• Added mesh_cat utility
• Added several options to mesh_filter
• Many bugfixes, including compilation errors, I/O, and mesh_view

Please contact smr at princeton edu if you have any questions about the code.