1stdimension/stl-viewer

Project to make a viewer for StL files using OpenGL

StL-Viewer

Description

Introduction

This is a student project. I wanted like to learn graphics API like OpenGL. My supervisor tasked me with making a viewer for StL Files.

Side note

It is being developed on Windows 10 using MinGW 8.1.0, with goal of being OS and compiler independent. However it was not yet tested on any machine with different OS nor compiled using different compiler.

StL files

According to StL format specification every surface of a 3d object is broken down into a number of triangles. Each triangle is described by 4 3-element vectors. 1st one is the normal vector of this figure, the rest are positions of the vertices. Files come in 2 forms, binary and ASCII. More on that can be found here.

Compilation

This is project was made using CMake, therefore it is essential to install it. What is CMake? From their project website:

CMake is an open-source, cross-platform family of tools designed to build, test and package software.

First clone this repository to a folder using git then run command

cmake folder

Where folder is path to root folder of project. CMake will then generate all files needed to build StL-Viewer on your system. In case of Linux it will be Makefiles and so on and so forth.

Requirements

• CMake 3.13 or newer
• C++ compiler supporting C++17
• Graphics card supporting OpenGL 3.3

Dependencies:

All of listed below are used as gitsubmodules in the libs directory. Because by default git doesn't download submodules you will need to use

git submodule update --init --recursive

If it's your first time checkout a repo. With that said dependencies are as follows:

• GLFW for OS independent windows
• Glad for modern OpenGL
• OpenGL Mathematics for matrix calculations`
• Catch2 for tests
• Yaml-cpp for configuration file