QSlim Simplification Software

This is the latest release of my QSlim software package. Functionally, it is quite similar to version 1.0. However, the underlying code has been almost totally rewritten. Some of the highlights of this release are:

• 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

      Unlike the original version of QSlim, this software is not public domain. Please read the MixKit license, which covers the majority of the simplification code, and the SlimKit license which covers the set of programs using the MixKit library. Copies of the GNU GPL and LGPL licenses are available online.

      This is the first public release of the MixKit software library. This software contains the bulk of the code I have developed in the course of my doctoral research at Carnegie Mellon University. Since I developed it for my own research purposes, the code may be a little ugly in places, and the selection of features has been largely driven by what I needed to get my work done. It's also been a place to toy around with experimental features. However, it's proven quite useful to me, and I hope you'll find it useful as well.

      I am releasing this software in the hope that you'll find it useful. 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. I'd also like to encourage you to contribute bug reports, patches, and whatever improvements you might come up with. If enough people are actively using this software, I may set up a mailing list. Please send me e-mail if you think this would be a useful resource.

Updates

Sep 3, 1999    The QSlim 2.0 distribution does not compile under Visual C++ 6.0. However, I have a small update available. After installing this update, you should be able to compiler under VC6. For details on the changes, please see the README file packaged with the update.

System Overview

This package contains two components, the MixKit library and the SlimKit collection of surface modeling tools. QSlim is the primary application in the SlimKit collection.

      QSlim can be built as both a command-line only 'qslim' program as well as an interactive 'qvis' program. Both programs should compile on pretty much any Unix system, as well as Windows 9x/NT. There is no support for MacOS, but if someone wants to do the port I'd very much like to have it. On Unix systems, the interactive program requires X11, OpenGL or Mesa, and the XForms library. On Win32 systems, the interactive program requires MFC and OpenGL.

      The details of the algorithms used in this software package are available online. A much more authoritative description can be found in my Ph.D. dissertation, which is now available.

Download

The main distribution contains all the necessary source code. I am also distributing the sample models which appear in the papers I've published about this algorithm.

The following packages contain precompiled binaries of the command-line program for various platforms.

Last modified: Fri Sep 3 12:08:02 EDT 1999