A Good 3D mesh library [closed]

Question

I'm looking for a good 3D Mesh library

• Should be able to read popular formats (OFF, OBJ...)
• Should support both half-edge structure and a triangle soup
• Should be tolerant to faults and illegal meshes.
• Basic geometric operations - intersections, normal calculation, etc'
• Most importantly - Should not be convoluted with endless template and inheritance hierarchies.

I've tried both CGAL and OpenMesh but both fail miserably in the last point.

Specifically CGAL which is impossible to follow even with the most advanced code analysis tools.

So far I'm seriously considering to pull my own.

My preference is C++ but I'm open to other options.

Answer 1

May I ask why the last point is a requirement?

Libraries written for public consumption are designed to be as generic as possible so that it is usable by the widest possible audience. In C++, this is often best done using templates. It would suck tremendously if found a good library, only to discover it was useless for your purposes because it used floats instead of doubles.

CGAL, for example, appears to have adopted the well-known and well-tested STL paradigm of writing generic and extensible C++ libraries. This does indeed make it difficult to follow with code analysis tools; I doubt they're much good at following STL headers either.

But are you trying to use the library or modify it? Either way, they seem to have some extremely high-quality documentation (e.g. Kernel Manual) that should make it relatively simple to figure out what you need to do, without having to resort to reading their code.

Disclaimer: I know this isn't what you're asking for. But I don't think what you're looking for exists. It is extraordinarily rare to find open source code with documentation as good as what I've seen scanning through CGAL. I would strongly suggest that you take another look at it.