Rob's Musings

My current research requires me (among other things) to calculate some discrete differential geometric quantities on triangular meshes.  Mainly stuff like curvature and the cotan weights of edges.  I was looking for a good library to make this task as easy as possible.  I searched for a while for something for Python, but had no luck.  Once I accepted the fact that I'd be using C++, CGAL jumped to mind.  Don't get me wrong, CGAL is a great library; feature-laden and well engineered.  However, it's really heavyweight.  Even getting the simplest things running requires a siginificant committment to reading their documentation and understanding the CGAL arch.  Eventually, I may take that route, but not right now (Siggraph deadline will be here before I know it!).  Anyway, I settled on trimesh2, a library written by Prof  Szymon Rusinkiewicz from Princeton.  It's not as feature rich as CGAL, but doesn't aim to be; it has a different set of goals.  My real motivation to adopt trimesh2 is its ease-of-use.  All of the mesh data, and the calculated ddg quantities aren't stored in some crazy, uber-templatized data structure.  Rather, they're exposed simply, for easy access.  If you need a simple library for mesh i/o and simple manipulation/calculation (but still with some very useful features), then I highly recommend trimesh2!  I'll be adding the link to my small by growing links page.