QSlim Simplification Software

This software is in the public domain and is provided AS IS. Use it at YOUR OWN RISK. This software is UNSUPPORTED. I've made it freely available, and you're free to do whatever you want with it. However, I don't have the resources to provide any real support for users, so you're more or less on your own.

      This software package is based on experimental software I developed for my own research purposes. As such, the code may be a little ugly in places, and it doesn't have all the features of industrial strength software. And there really isn't much documentation. However, it's proven quite useful to me, and I hope you'll find it useful as well.

      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. And if you find bugs in the software, please let me know. Even better, you can send me a patch if you decide to fix the problem yourself.

System Overview

This package contains two components, the GFX library and the QSlim program. GFX is just my library for holding various bits of handy code. QSlim contains all the actual surface simplification code.

      QSlim can be built as both a command-line only 'qslim' program as well as an interactive 'qvis' program. The command-line program should compile on pretty much any Unix system, as well as Windows 95/NT. The interactive program requires X11, OpenGL or Mesa, and the XForms library.

      The details of the algorithms used in this software package are available online, and in the SIGGRAPH 97 paper "Surface Simplification Using Quadric Error Metrics."

Download

The main distribution contains the QSlim source code, some documentation, and a sample model of a cow. I've also built binary versions on a few different platforms. These are packaged without documentation or samples, so please download the main distribution as well.

Now available: QSlim 2.0

• Substantially faster with less memory consumption
• Packaged as a C++ library for easier integration into other packages
• Some support for surfaces with material properties (i.e., color and texture)
• Interactive version compiles on both X11 and Windows
• Support for progressive mesh type structures

Last modified: Wed Mar 17 16:04:44 EST 1999