CAD like 3D geometry C/C++ library

Question

Dear all,

I am looking for a good 3D CAD like library. I need basic geometry shapes (cube, sphere, torus etc.) and the library should make the surface mesh - based on the shapes and some boolean operations.

I like VTK. It has great source objects, but unfortunatelly it has no intersection and union filters/commands.

I have found many other libraries on google, but most of them are not really confortable, and/or do not support union/intersection.

-> www.geometros.com/sgcore/index.htm - I want something like this, but it has memory leak on public free version. To generate 5.000 sphere (10x10 mesh, 500.000 points) takes more than 20 seconds without rendering (I am not sure if it is fast or not),
-> www.opencsg.org/ - I am trying, but my project is not open source,
-> carve-csg.com/ - I would not buy anything without trying,
-> gts.sourceforge.net/ - looks nice. Unfortunatelly it has GNU license,
-> www.ogre3d.org/ - I haven't found basic geometric shapes and boolean operators,
-> brlcad.org/ - its interface is not clear for me,
-> www.cgal.org/ - currently I try to make it work.

Open source would be nice, but not necessary. Multi platform support would be nice, but not necessary. (OS: Windows; compiler: Visual Studio 2008)

Many thanks for help,

Naszta

Answer 1

Separate rendering from geometry manipulation.

Intersection and union are called Boolean operations. CGAL has these algorithms as well as many others.

Render with any other library, like OpenGL.

Answer 2

Both CGAL and GTS are excellent IMHO (CGAL probably having the larger feature set and more attention to precision-related "robustness" issues).

I'm surprised you rule out GTS because of it's license; LGPL is actually very compatible with closed source provided you keep things linked dynamically (and release any patches to GTS you do make), but there's no reason for it to force you to open your own sources. Similarly CGAL is also (mostly?) LGPL, but at least you can buy a commercial license.

If you "like VTK" you might find K-3D interesting. It's always been an impressive polygon-oriented modelling package, and a recent release added CSG support using CGAL, but I haven't tried it myself.