Software Developing Tools for CS524
NEW - Graphite introduction presentation here.
Overview
In this course you have the choice between two software tools to help you write your assignments and final project: Graphite and MeshMaker.
Graphite is an open architecture graphical platform developed by INRIA in France. On the up side it is very powerful and it works on both Linux and Windows machines (see fine print below). It also contains a rich set of algorithms that you can use out of the box for your final project. On the down side it has a steeper learning curve, it is trickier to set-up because has a lot of dependencies and it requires a very good understanding of C++, object oriented and template programming and it has very sparse documentation.
MeshMaker is a lightweight Windows program that uses a corner table data structure and provides rendering support using OpenGL. It is relatively simple to use, it is well documented, it has minimum dependencies and you should be able to do all your assignments in it.
We recommend that you use Graphite over Meshmaker, espescially if you plan to do geometry work in the future. Even though it has poor documentation, it has a rich set of tools for the assignments and your final project. Otherwise, Meshmaker will be sufficient for completing your assignments.
The following table outlines the support for each of them:
|
|
Dept. Linux |
Dept. Windows |
Personal Linux |
Personal Windows |
|
Graphite |
Full Support |
Limited Support. |
No support |
No support. |
|
MeshMaker |
N/A |
Full Support |
N/A |
Little support |
Release notes and downloads
Graphite
Linux Departmental Machines: /ubc/cs/home/i/iansouth/pub/GraphiteOne_1.9_a4_dgp_UBC.tar.gz
The tar ball contains a README file with detailed instructions.
Important: You need to change your shell to bash. Log in to a server machine such as okanagan and type chsh. Type your password and than at the prompt type: /bin/bash for the location of the new shell. You will also need to change your .bashrc file. By default it is a symlink to another file. Remove the symlink and create your own .bashrc file. Copy the content of the sym-linked file to the top of your .bashrc.
Personal Linux machine. You can find a version of graphite, cmake and qt4 that work for us under /ubc/cs/home/s/stpopa/public524/dependencies/
Alternatively, you can install the author's distribution here. There is a new version as of Sept 7th, 2008, but it is not yet supported by us.
Windows Departmental Machine: /ubc/cs/home/i/iansouth/pub/graphite_ubc_vs2005.zip
This version includes some fixes for the linux departmental version to work with Visual Studio 2005, and includes QT4. You will need to install cmake and Python 2.4 on your account.Important: The included version of QT4 will sometimes crash Graphite on startup, but this is the only version that will work with in Debug mode. If you wish to use a version that only works in Release mode (but doesn't crash), follow these instructions by Hongbo Fu to compile the latest QT in VS2005:
http://hongbofu.blogspot.com/2007/12/how-to-comile-qt-open-source-edition-in.htmlPersonal Windows Machine:
You can use the version for Windows departmental machines above.
Notes:
· We do not support graphite on your own machine. If you decide to install it, you are on your own.
· VRML support in Graphite is not very good. If you open a wrl model in Graphite and nothing shows up it could be because the load failed due to a bug in Graphite’s VRML loader.
· There is a Graphite user page on the departmental wiki. Its content is pretty sparse right now, but you are encouraged to check it out and contribute content. The wiki require authentication; you can use the name/password combination that you use when you log in into a departmental Linux machine.
MeshMaker
Meshmaker for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005: http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~cs236329/#software
If you need to use Visual Studio 2003, we have an older version available, but we do not support it:
Meshmaker for Microsoft Visual Studio 2003: /ubc/cs/home/i/iansouth/pub/MeshMaker5.37.zip