The VCG Library

The Visualization and Computer Graphics Library (VCG for short) is a open source portable C++ templated library for manipulation, processing and displaying with OpenGL of triangle and tetrahedral meshes.

VCG Lib uses a git repository hosted by github at http://github.com/cnr-isti-vclab/vcglib/

The library, composed by more than 100k lines of code, is released under the GPL license, and it is the base of most of the software tools of the Visual Computing Lab of the Italian National Research Council Institute ISTI (http://vcg.isti.cnr.it), like metro and MeshLab.

The VCG library is tailored to mostly manage triangular meshes: The library is fairly large and offers many state of the art functionalities for processing meshes, like:

• high quality quadric-error edge-collapse based simplification,
• efficient spatial query structures (uniform grids, hashed grids, kdtree, ...) ,
• advanced smoothing and fairing algorithms,
• computation of curvature,
• optimization of texture coordinates,
• Hausdorff distance computation,
• Geodesic paths,
• mesh repairing capabilities,
• isosurface extraction and advancing front meshing algorithms,
• Poisson Disk sampling and other tools to sample point distributions over meshes,
• subdivision surfaces,

Documentation

Start from the following pages for basic concepts and examples.

• Installing the VCG Library
• Basic Concepts
• Optional Component
• Bit Flags on mesh elements
• Adjacency and Topology
• Creating and destroying elements
• Adding user defined attributes to mesh elements
• Loading and saving meshes
• Camera and shot abstraction for managing views
• Short Examples showing various features of the library

Notable Applications

A number of applications have been developed using the vcglib:

• MeshLab: the renowned open source mesh processing is based on this library.
• Metro, the tool for measuring differences between meshes
• The first high quality out-of-core mesh simplifier that was used by the Stanford Digital Michelangelo project to process their huge 3D scanned models.

Contacts

For any info about licensing (portion of) the library please contact us:
Paolo Cignoni (p.cig.nosp@m.noni.nosp@m.@isti.nosp@m..cnr.nosp@m..it)
Fabio Ganovelli (f.gan.nosp@m.ovel.nosp@m.li@is.nosp@m.ti.c.nosp@m.nr.it)
Visual Computing Lab of the Italian National Research Council - ISTI

In case of bugs please report them here.