Efficient Clipping of Arbitrary Polygons using OpenGPL
Based on the paper "Efficient Clipping of Arbitrary Polygons" by Günther Greiner (greiner[at]informatik.uni-erlangen.de) and Kai Hormann (hormann[at]informatik.tu-clausthal.de), ACM Transactions on Graphics 1998;17(2):71-83.
Available at: http://www.inf.usi.ch/hormann/papers/Greiner.1998.ECO.pdf
Motivation
This work was created for educational purposes only, as an implementation in Python of the above algorithm, for a class in Graphical Computation.
To study the algorithm, inspect the file polygon.py. It can be imported and used in other contexts (i.e., not OpenGL).
Import
> import polygon
> help(polygon)
> from polygon import *Command line
The command line interface (polyclip.py) is provided for demonstration or testing purposes, using OpenGL.
Requirements
Supports Python 2.5 or later.
Requires PyOpenGL (version 3 as of this writing). If you have pip, install is easy:
pip install pyopengl
Usage
Supported operations are: union, intersection and difference.
Polygon overrides
Subject and clip polygon can be defined per command line option. Defaults for the subject and clip polygon are set at the beggining of the file for easy edit, but they can be overriden from the command line using the options --subj-poly and --clip-poly.
Example:
polyclip.py --subj-poly="1.5, 1.25; 7.5, 2.5; 4, 3; 4.5, 6.5"
Options
Type polyclip.py -h for available options. Press Esc to exit.