twtravel/cartel

Mesh Viewing and Modification Tool

Cartel

Mesh Viewing and Modification Tool

Overview

Cartel is a mesh visualization and modification tool designed for simplicity and clarity. It is built on top of a basic OpenGL 3.3 environment using the GLFW windowing system, and enables complex rendering effects through the easy use of shaders. Deployment and compilation are simple due to the use of few, and common, dependencies.

About

Cartel was developed in early 2014 by Russell Gillette and Darcy Harisson with the sole purpose of never having to use Meshlab ever again. It was developped from a rendering framework that Russell had been working on across many projects and a half-edge data structure that Darcy had whipped together to try and use Maya instead. Where meshlab offered an exceedingly complicated interface, exceedingly complicated dependancies, and minimal documentation, we have strived to offer a clean interface with only the basic modeling accoutrements. There is no QT, and model modification code is added directly to the model representation internally. Furthermore we enforce mesh manifoldness at all times. You will curse the asserts that this causes. But trust me, having lots of problems as soon as you do something stupid is better than having sparadic problems long after with no clue as to why. --Russell

This fork focuses on many usability improvements, both during setup, while coding, and while using the program:

• Improved Unix support with revamped Makefile. It should work on OSX just by installing few common dependencies. For more info, check the Makefile directly.
• Cleanup and code fixes
• Added ImGui as a user interface to improve usability such as loading models and changing view modes. The developer is also encouraged to add their own functionality in the menu bar, and can potentially implement controls such as sliders, inputs, etc to change parameters without modifying the source code.

--Giorgio

Dependencies

The libraries included with the build are for VisualStudio 2012 or later, and the source code includes some (though not many) C++ 11 operations, and thus will not work with earlier compilers. That said, there is nothing OS specific within the code, and alternative libraries are easily acquired at the below links.

GLEW

GLEW is the extension wrangler library for OpenGL that allows the use of newer OpenGL functionality on computers that do not support it. You will never have to do anything using this library, its just included, and thus worth mentioning. Its home webpage is here: http://glew.sourceforge.net/

GLM

GLM is the open gl math extensions and provides a lot of useful functionality when interfacing with GLSL, the OpenGL shader language. This library provides types, and functions on those types used SOLELY FOR RENDERING. This is important, because the glm types do not o�er double precision, and do not interface easily with Eigen. Use glm only for visual e�ects or when passing data to the GPU in main. http://glm.g-truc.net/0.9.5/index.html

GLFW

GLFW is the windowing system used by Cartel. It is a common replacement for GLUT, and was chosen due to its nicer rendering loop and newer interface. This windowing library is cross-platform, allowing the deployment of this system across OSes, but does, at the time of writing this, make setting up this project on a linux system with integrated graphics dificult. http://www.glfw.org/

Eigen

Eigen is the back-end linear-algebra library used by Cartel, and the largest source of complexity within the project. This library makes heavy use of templates, but is well documented. Documentation can found here: http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

ImGui

ImGui is the user interface library used by Cartel. It should never create dependency issues as it's small and included in the project. For more information on the library check its page: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui