fstl

fstl is the fastest .stl file viewer.

It is designed to quickly load and render very high-polygon models; showing 2 million triangles at 60+ FPS on a mid-range laptop.

For more details, see the project page.

Issues and minor pull requests are welcome; the project is under 1K lines of code and should be fairly approachable.

Screenshot

(credit to Pranav Panchal)

Building

The only dependency for fstl is Qt 5.

macOS

Install Qt from their website or Homebrew, making sure qmake is on your shell's path.

Then, run through the following set of commands in a shell:

git clone https://github.com/mkeeter/fstl
cd fstl
mkdir build
cd build
qmake ../qt/fstl.pro
make -j8
./fstl.app/Contents/MacOS/fstl

To package a standalone app, go to the app directory and run package.sh

cd ../app
./package.sh

This should produce two new files in the root directory:

fstl.app is a standalone application that can be copied to /Applications
fstl.dmg is a disk image that can be given to a friend

Linux

Install Qt with your distro's package manager (required libraries are Core, Gui, Widgets and OpenGL, e.g. qt5-default and libqt5opengl5-dev on Debian).

You can build fstl with qmake (in some distros qmake-qt5) or with CMake:

git clone https://github.com/mkeeter/fstl
cd fstl
mkdir build
cd build

qmake ../qt/fstl.pro  # For qmake build
cmake ..              # For CMake build

make -j8
./fstl

License

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.