I'm looking for an algorithm (or implementation) to create a tetrahedral mesh from a closed (i.e. without holes) 3D triangular mesh.
The best solution would be an open source application that can import mesh files (e.g. OBJ, STL and VTK), display them, and provide an option to tetrahedralize the mesh. But I'm also fine with command line tools, or just outlines of an algorithm.
Some background — I'm using Blender on a Linux system to design the surface meshes. Eventually I plan to implement a tetrahedralization algorithm in either Python or MATLAB.
I already stumbled upon a few application names while searching for a good mesher, but so far I don't have any concrete results. Any information on relevant papers, algorithms or implementations is therefore most welcome!
Applications found mentioned so far:
MeshLab
TetGen
Gmsh
Rhino
A few relevant terms:
Delaunay (3D)
Advancing Front Meshing
You may use the GEOGRAM software that I'm developping:
http://alice.loria.fr/software/geogram/doc/html/index.html
(it supports STL and OBJ file format).
Under the scene, it uses tetgen. It also has visualization with OpenGL.
Related
I'm currently rendering a 3D model (Wavefront .obj format) in my Qt program. Right now, I'm rendering the model using Scene3D in QML, and I'm able to get it to display in the viewing area. What I would like to do is have a user click on the model and generate a 2D cross section of the slice that I would like to plot on a different window. I'm quite new to 3D rendering, and a lot of Qt documentation isn't very descriptive. I've been reading Qt documentation, experimenting, and searching online with no luck. How can I create 2D slices of a 3D object Model in Qt 3D, preferably in QML? What Qt libraries or classes can I use to achieve this?
Unfortunately, the fact that models are stored as a set of surfaces makes this hard. QT probably doesn't have a built in method for this.
Consider, for example, that a model made of faces might be missing a face. What now? can you interpolate across that gap consistently from different angles? What about the fact that a cross-section probably won't contain any vertices?
But, of course, it can be solved. First, just don't allow un-closed surfaces (meshes with holes). Second, for finding the vertices of your cross-section, perform an intersection between every edge in your model and the plane you're using, and if there's an intersection, there's a point there. Third, to find the edges, look at the list of vertices, and any two that are from an edge on the same polygon in the mesh should be connected by an edge in the cross section. To find which direction the edge should go, project the normal of the polygon onto the plane your using. For filling, I don't really know what to do. I guess that's whatever you want it to be.
The detection of edges in 3d objects may be the first step for the automatic processing of particular characteristics and landmarks.
Thus, I'm looking for a method to identify such edges for some of my 3d-scanned objects.
However, with all my ideas (Hough transformation, angles threshold for neighboring vertices) I didn't succeed.
Thus, I'd be quite happy if someone could point me to a solution to the edge-finding-problem for 3d point clouds which can be applied using R.
There is a nice paper from last year about this topic.
Basically, you need to compute several features, for each point, based on it's neighbors.
I usually prefer Python over R so I'm not aware of any point-cloud processing package un R. But the implementation of that paper in R should be easy.
If you can translate Python-R, you can take a look at this library that I wrote as it has already implemented the computation of all the features mentioned on that paper.
If that helps you, in this answer you can find example code on how to add the curvature for each point. You just have to replace the word curvature with the other names of features.
I am completely new to 3D and started with Jeff Lamarche's tutorials as an introduction to openGL ES for iPhone, then so far, I am able to draw a spinning sphere, which will the base of my application.
What I want to do is render a planet Earth, thanks to 2D GIS vector data (polygones, lines or points with latitude/longitude or x/y coord).
I want to be able to turn different layers on/off and maybe able to identify an object that wold be touched.
My questions are :
would it be easier to rasterize my vector data to use them as image texture or apply the vector data onto the sphere (keeping in mind that I want to turn on/off the layers, the touch-enabled objects being optional)?
would it be easier to use a software like blender to draw the planet and add the layers rather than starting with the sphere I already have (procedural sphere)?
do the export tool from blender to opengl work well?
This kind of question is difficult to answer in general. Technically your intention sounds a lot like if you would like to write a program like Google Earth or KDE Marble. Since you're referring to GIS data you will require very high resolution. Textures only make sense for limited resolution data.
GIS applications usually work using hybrid approaches where some vector data are rendered directly (roads, waters, borders), while others are rendered to texture and the texture, or more accurately texture tiles, being used as caches, for example for building outlines in dense cities or the like. However data as it comes from say OSM can be directly rendered as vector data, since they are not very dense.
I wish to develop a softare for 3D object compression (by polygon reduction) in flex using papervision 3D. Could you please suggest me an efficient algorithm for the same?
Take a look at A Short Survey of Mesh Simplification Algorithms and follow the references for the details.
I am IT student and I have to make a project in VB6, I was thinking to make a 3D Software Renderer but I don't really know where to start, I found a few tutorials but I want something that goes in depth with the maths and algorithms, I will like something that shows how to make 3D transformations, Camera, lights, shading ...
It does not matter the programing language used, I just need some resources that shows me exactly how to make this.
So I just want to know where to find some resources, or you can show me some source code and tell me where to start from.
Or if any of you have a better idea for a VB6 project.
Thanks.
I disagree with the previous posts, a 3D renderer is actually pretty simple. A high-quality 3D renderer is hard however.
Get a bunch of 3D data, triangles are simplest.
Learn about homogenous coordinates and the great 4x4 matrix for transforms.
Define a camera by a position and a rotation (expressed in the 4x4 matrix).
Transform your 3D geometry by this camera.
Perform the perspective divide and scale to your window. This converts your 3D data to 2D.
Render the data as 2D.
Now you're going to lose out on a depth buffer, so stick to wireframes in the beginning. :-)
Don't listen to these nay-sayers, go out and have some fun!
Many years ago I made a shaded triangle renderer that used library calls to draw the triangles. It's a rather naive approach but you would be able to achieve the same result using VB6. I got all the maths & techniques from "Computer Graphics principles and practice" by Foley et al. Some parts are out of date now but I think you'd find it very helpful for this project and it can be bought 2nd hand at reasonable prices from Amazon for example.
One simple approach could be:
Read model file as triangles
Transform each triangle using matrices to account for camera position
Project triangle points onto 2D
Draw 2D triangle (probably using GDI)
This covers wireframe viewing. To extend this to hidden surface removal you need to work out which triangles are in front. Two possible ways:
Z-order sorting the triangles and drawing the ones furthest from the camera first. This is simple but inefficient if there are a lot of triangles and can give overlapping triangle effects when the order is not quite correct. You also have to decide how to sort the triangles - e..g by centroid, by extents...
Using a software depth buffer. This will give better results but is more work to implement. You will have to write your own triangle drawing code so cannot rely on GDI. See bresenham's line algorithm and related algorithms for doing filled triangles for how to do this.
After this you'd also need some kind of shading based on lighting. The calculations are covered in Computer Graphics principles and practice. For simple shading you can stick with drawing triangles using gdi , but if you want to do gouraud or phong shading the colour values vary across a triangle. One way around this is to sub-divide the triangle into smaller triangles, but this is inefficient and won't give very nice looking results. Better would be to draw the triangles yourself as required above for the software depth buffer.
A good extension would be to support primitives other than triangles. Basic approach would be to split primitives into triangles as you read them.
Good luck - could be an interesting project.
VB6 is not the best suited language to do maths and 3D graphics, and given that you have no previous knowledge about the subject either, I would recommend you to choose something different (and easier).
As it's Visual Basic, you could try something more form-oriented, that is the original intent of the language.
There is the 3D engine list which lists three engine in pure basic (an oxymoron) + Source code and of them one is in Visual Basic (Dex3D)
DeX3D is an open source 3D engine
coded entirely in Visual Basic from
Jerry Chen ( -onlyuser#hotmail.com ).
Gouraud shading
Transparency
Fogging
Omni and spot lights
Hierarchical meshes
Support for 3D Studio files
Particle systems
Bezier curve segments
2.5 D text
Visual Basic source
More information, screenshots and the
source can be found on the Dex3D
Homepage. (<= Dead Link)
EGL25 by Erkan Sanli is a fast open source VB 6 renderer that can render, rotate, animate, etc. complex solid shapes made of thousands of polygons. Just Windows API calls – no DirectX, no OpenGL.
VBMigration.com chose EGL25 as a high-quality open-source VB6 project to demonstrate their VB6 to VB.Net upgrade tool.
A 3D software renderer as a whole project is fairly complex if you've never done it before. I would suggest something smaller - like just doing the 3D portion and using lines to do the rendering OR just write a shaded triangle renderer (which is the underpinnings of 3D renderers anyway).
Something a little simpler rather than trying to write a full-blown 3D software renderer on the first go - especially in VB.
A software renderer is a very difficult project and the language VB6 is not indicated at all ( for a task like this c++ is the way.. ), anyway I can suggest you some great books I used:
Shaders: http://wiki.gamedev.net/index.php/D3DBook:Introduction_%28Volume%29
Math: 3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development
There are other 2 books. Even if they are for VB.NET you can find some useful code:
.NET Game Programming with DirectX 9.0
Beginning .NET Game Programming in VB .NET
I think you can take two ways either go the Direct X way and use DirectX 8 that has VB 5-6 support. I found a page http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article1308.asp
You can always write a engine group up but by doing so you will need some basic linear algebra like Frank Krueger suggests.