libfive

Infrastructure for solid modeling.

(formerly known as mkeeter/ao)

About

libfive is a framework for solid modeling using functional representations.

It includes several layers, ranging from infrastructure to GUI:

The libfive shared library contains functions to build, manipulate, and render f-reps. A great deal of work has gone into the meshing algorithm, which produces watertight, manifold, hierarchical, feature-preserving triangle meshes. The library is written in C++ and exposes a C API in libfive.h.
libfive-guile is a Guile binding to libfive. It exposes a high-level API to construct shapes, and includes a standard library of shapes, transforms, and CSG operations.
Studio is a GUI application in the style of OpenSCAD. It wraps libfive-guile and allows for live-coding of solid models. The interface also includes direct modeling, where the user can push and pull on the model's surface to change variables in the script.

Compiling from source

The full system (libfive + libfive-guile + Studio) has been successfully compiled on Mac and Linux. There's also a third-party fork here that builds libfive on Windows with MSVC.

Dependencies

On a Mac with homebrew installed, run

brew install cmake pkg-config eigen libpng qt guile boost

On a Ubuntu machine, run

sudo apt-get install cmake pkg-config libeigen3-dev libpng-dev qtbase5-dev guile-2.2-dev libboost-all-dev

(untested; open an issue or PR if this doesn't work for you)

Qt and Guile are optional; if they aren't present, then the Guile bindings and Studio will not be included in the build (and cmake will print a message to that effect).

Invocation

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/usr/local/Cellar/qt5/5.7.0  ..
make

Adjust based on your Qt installation path, and consider using ninja for faster builds.

License

Different layers of this project are released under different licenses:

The libfive dynamic library is released under the LGPL, version 2 or later.
libfive-guile and Studio are released under the GPL, version 2 or later.