Easy3D is an open source library for 3D modeling and geometry processing. It is implemented in C++ and designed with an emphasis on simplicity and efficiency.

Easy3D is intended for research and educational purposes, but it is also a good starting point for developing sophisticated 3D applications.

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Key features

• Efficient data structures for representing and managing 3D models (i.e., point clouds and meshes). Easy to add/access arbitrary types of per-element properties.
• High-level encapsulation of OpenGL and GLSL for convenient and efficient rendering (based on modern and faster programmable-shader-style rendering, i.e., no fixed fucntion calls). Users do not need to touch the low-level APIs of OpenGL.
• A viewer that can be used directly to visualize 3D scenes in various formats, which can also be easily extended.
• Step-by-step tutorials to get acquainted with the data structures and basic rendering for 3D modeling and geometry processing.

The following rendering algorithms will be available soon:

• Ambient occlusion: SSAO, HBAO, cache-aware HBAO
• Shadow: hard shadow (shadow maps), soft shadow (PCSS)
• Transparency: average color blending, dual depth peeling
• Eye-dome lighting: for rendering point clouds without normal information
• and more ...

A quick glance

Any types of 3D drawables (e.g., points, lines, triangles, and thus point clouds, mesh surfaces, scalar fields, vector fields) can be rendered by writing a few lines of code. The following example first loads a point cloud from a file, creates a drawable of the points, and then uses the default viewer to visualize the point cloud. The rendering result is shown in Figure 1.

	Viewer viewer;	// create the default Easy3D viewer

	PointCloud* cloud = new PointCloud;	// create a point cloud
	cloud->read("../../../data/bunny.bin");	// load point cloud data from a file

	// create a drawable (a set of points that can be rendered)
	PointsDrawable* drawable = cloud->add_points_drawable("points");

	// collect points, colors, and normals (if exist) and transfer them to GPU
	auto points = cloud->get_vertex_property<vec3>("v:point");
	drawable->update_vertex_buffer(points.vector());
	auto normals = cloud->get_vertex_property<vec3>("v:normal");
	if (normals)	// if normals exist
		drawable->update_normal_buffer(normals.vector());
	auto colors = cloud->get_vertex_property<vec3>("v:color");
	if (colors)	// if colors exist
		drawable->update_color_buffer(colors.vector());

	// add the model to the viewer
	viewer.add_model(cloud);

	// run the viewer
	viewer.run();

Bellow is another example showing how to render a surface model (the result is in Figure 2).

	SurfaceMesh* mesh = new SurfaceMesh;	// create a surface mesh
	
	// create a drawable for rendering the surface of this model
	FacesDrawable* drawable = mesh->add_faces_drawable("surface");

	// transfer vertex coordinates and colors to the GPU. 
	drawable->update_vertex_buffer(demodata::vertices);	// an array of 3D points
	drawable->update_color_buffer(demodata::colors); 	// an array of colors
	
	drawable->set_per_vertex_color(true);	// vertices have different colors

	// add the model to the viewer
	viewer.add_model(mesh);

By abstracting geometric elements as drawables, more general visualization can be done very conveniently. Figure 3 shows the visualization of a scalar field (i.e., height) defined on the mesh vertices.

Figure 1	Figure 2	Figure 3

Build

Easy3D has been tested on macOs, Linux, and Windows. You should also be able to build it on other platforms.

Clone or download the repository, run CMake to generate Makefiles or CMake/Visual Studio project files, and then use your favorite IDE to work with Easy3D.

In case you use Qt Creator, simply open the CMakeLists.txt file. Then, all files will be well organized as projects.

License

Easy3D is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License or (at your option) any later version. The full text of the license can be found in the accompanying 'License' file.

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Should you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please contact me at [email protected]

Liangliang Nan

https://3d.bk.tudelft.nl/liangliang/

Dec. 8, 2018

Copyright (C) 2018