Carna

Carna provides classes for simple and fast visualization of CT data. It is named after the greek god of organs (yup, they really did have even one for organs). It is based on OpenGL 3.3 and Eigen 3.

Go to: Library Documentation

Dependencies
Build instructions
Including in your project
See also

1. Dependencies

Eigen ≥ 3.0.5
OpenGL 3.3
GLEW ≥ 1.7

Compilation process has been tested with following tool chains:

GCC 4.6 works but is known to have a bug in the C++11 regex module that prevents the test suite from operating properly.
GCC 4.9: is known to be fully supported.
Visual Studio 2010 is known to be fully supported.

2. Build instructions

The default build process requires CMake ≥ 3.0.2.

This section explains three ways of building Carna:

Creating Visual Studio project files and building it from the IDE
Building Carna directly through CMake from command line
If you are a colleague from MediTEC, you can use the batch script.
On Linux you can run the linux_build.sh script.

Regardless which build method you pick, first thing you need to do is to fetch the latest stable version. If you are using git from command line, you can simply run following command from within the directory where you want to download the sources:

git clone https://github.com/RWTHmediTEC/Carna.git

After a few seconds there should be a new folder named Carna at your current working directory.

2.1. Creating Visual Studio project files

First create the directory where the Visual Studio files should go to:

cd Carna

mkdir build
mkdir build\VisualStudio2010

cd build\VisualStudio2010

Then initialize the Visual Studio environment:

call "%VS100COMNTOOLS%\vsvars32.bat"

And finally invoke CMake like this:

cmake -G"Visual Studio 10" -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="C:\Libs" ..\..

You may also leave out the -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX parameter if you do not want to specify any particular installation directory. In this case the default installation directory will be set, which is the value of the environmental variable %ProgramFiles% on Windows.

At this point the Visual Studio project files are ready. You can proceed by opening the solution file Carna.sln that was created in Carna\build\VisualStudio2010. Note that building the INSTALL project from the solution actually triggers the installation routine to the destination you configured via -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX.

2.2. Building directly

The first step is to create the directories where the results of the building process will be stored. You can use any names you like for the directories, it's only important to distinguish between "debug" and "release" files:

cd Carna

mkdir build
mkdir build\debug
mkdir build\release

Then initialize the building environment. Use the command below if you are going to use Visual Studio for compilation:

call "%VS100COMNTOOLS%\vsvars32.bat"

Now it's time to run the build process. Lets build the "debug" version first:

cd build\debug
cmake -G"NMake Makefiles" -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="C:\Libs" -DBUILD_DOC=OFF ..\..
nmake

The parameter -DBUILD_DOC=OFF forces CMake to skip running Doxygen, if it is installed at all. The idea is to build the documentation only once. Since we are going to build the "release" version next, leaving out this parameter at this point would lead to Doxygen being triggered twice.

Run nmake install now if you wish to install the "debug" version on your system.

If everything went well, run the build for the "release" version:

cd ..\nmake_release
cmake -G"NMake Makefiles" -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..\..
nmake

Run nmake install (again) if you want to install the "release" version.

2.3. Installation notes

You may need finer control of the installation routines' destinations. Regardless which of the methods presented above you choose, you can specify the destinations for the headers, the library and the generated CMake files by passing particular parameters to cmake:

INSTALL_CMAKE_DIR specifies where the FindCarna.cmake file goes to.
INSTALL_LIBRARY_DIR specifies where the built binary files go to.
INSTALL_HEADERS_DIR specifies where the headers are going to installed to.
INSTALL_DOC_DIR specifies where the HTML documentation is going to be installed.

If you use relative paths for these parameters, they will be resolved relatively to CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX. Consider using absolute paths if you don't want that.

2.4. The MediTEC-way

Make sure you have the environmental variable %MEDITEC_LIBS% set and it is poiting to an existing directory that you have permissions to write to, than

run create_msvc10_project.bat to create the Visual Studio project files, or
run win32_msvc10_build.bat to build and install the whole package.

3. Including in your project

It is assumed at this point that you either have built and installed Carna with CMake, or you have fetched the binaries and the corresponding headers from somewhere.

3.1. The CMake-way

Add a find_package directive to your project's CMakeLists.txt file, e.g.:

find_package( Carna REQUIRED )
include_directories( ${CARNA_INCLUDE_DIR} )

If you need to put a constraint on the version, use find_package(Carna 3.0.0 REQUIRED) to pick a package with a version compatible to 3.0.0, or use find_package(Carna 3.0.0 EXACT REQUIRED) to pick a package by the exact version.

You also need to add the headers (usually only the headers) from Eigen:

find_package( Eigen3 3.0.5 REQUIRED )
include_directories( ${EIGEN3_INCLUDE_DIR} )

Finally add Carna to the linking stage:

target_link_libraries( ${TARGET_NAME} ${SOME_OTHER_LIBRARIES} ${CARNA_LIBRARIES} )

This method relies on CMake being able to locate the proper FindCarna.cmake file. If you've built Carna from source, than you have determined its location either through CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX or INSTALL_CMAKE_DIR as described in "installation notes". You can specify the paths CMake searches for FindCarna.cmake by adjusting the CMAKE_MODULE_PATH variable, e.g.:

list( APPEND CMAKE_MODULE_PATH "C:/CMake/Modules" )

3.2 The MediTEC-way

If you are a colleague from MediTEC, you must also add the following line of code before find_package, otherwise CMake will not find Carna:

list(APPEND CMAKE_MODULE_PATH "${MEDITEC_LIBS}/Carna/3.0")

3.3. Manually

Find where your header files are located. You might look for Carna.h or Version.h. Both of these files are contained by a directory named Carna. Add the parent directory of the Carna directory, that contains Carna.h and Version.h in turn, to your project's include directories.

Then find the appropriate library file. It's name depends on your platform and Carna version, e.g. Carna-3.0.0.lib for the release and Carna-3.0.0d.lib for the debug version respectively of Carna 3.0.0 on Windows. Add both of these files to your project's linking stage.

4. See also

The additional CarnaQt module provides auxiliary classes for using Carna ≥3.0.0 with Qt ≥4.8.
The CarnaDICOM module provides classes for loading DICOM datasets with Carna ≥3.0.1.

RWTHmediTEC/Carna