(Released July 4, 2004)
This is the latest verion of my QSlim software package. The core of the system remains largely the same as in Version 2.0. However, some features have been updated and some bugs have been fixed. Notable changes in this release include:
This software is not public domain. Please read the licenses for the MixKit library, which covers the majority of the simplification code, and the SlimKit package, which covers the set of programs using the MixKit library. Copies of the GNU GPL and LGPL licenses are available online.
The immediate motivation for releasing it was that version 2.0 no longer compiled with GCC 3.x compilers. This version compiles correctly on modern platforms — I’ve personally tried it on current versions of Mac OSX, Linux, and Cygwin. However, I haven’t provided any default build files for Visual C++ as I don’t really use VC++ any more.
This is the last release of the MixKit software library. It actually contains code that had been laying around on my desktop for a quite a while. I pretty much ceased active development of this code base 3–4 years ago. However, I would be happy to post any patches that I discover or that people send to me. And while this is the last of the MixKit-based versions of QSlim, there may be future QSlim releases based on an entirely different code base.
This software contains the bulk of the code I developed in the course of my doctoral research at Carnegie Mellon University. Since I developed it for my own research purposes, the code may be a little ugly in places, and the selection of features has been largely driven by what I needed to get my work done. It’s also been a place to toy around with experimental features. However, it’s proven quite useful to me, and I hope you’ll find it useful as well.
I am releasing this software in the hope that you’ll find it useful. If you use my software for anything more substantial than toying around, I’d be interested to hear about it. Any other comments you’d like to make are also welcome. I’d also like to encourage you to contribute bug reports, patches, and whatever improvements you might come up with. If enough people are actively using this software, I may set up a mailing list. Please send me e-mail if you think this would be a useful resource.
This package contains two components, the MixKit library and the SlimKit collection of surface modeling tools. QSlim is the primary application in the SlimKit collection.
QSlim can be built as both a command-line only ‘qslim’ program as well as an interactive ‘qvis’ program. Both programs should compile on pretty much any Unix system, as well as Windows 9x/NT. There is no support for MacOS, but if someone wants to do the port I’d very much like to have it. The interactive program requires OpenGL or Mesa and the FLTK GUI toolkit.
The details of the algorithms used in this software package are available online. A much more authoritative description can be found in my Ph.D. dissertation, which is now available.
The main distribution contains all the necessary source code. I am also distributing the sample models which appear in the papers I’ve published about this algorithm.