Simple Mesh Rendering Application

This is a simple mesh rendering application to display full meshes or wireframes.

Usage

Installing Dependencies

A requirements.txt file is included. These dependencies can be installed using: pip install -r requirements.txt after creating a virtual environment if desired.

Running the Application

The mesh_renderer.py module is used to run the application. To run this, change into the directory into src/, and then run python mesh_renderer.py. This will run the application with the default file: data/object.txt. To specify a different object file, run python mesh_renderer.py --mesh-filepath={path/to/file.txt}, replacing what is in the brackets with the desired csv file to load.

• python mesh_renderer.py: Runs the application with data/object.txt
• python mesh_renderer.py --mesh-filepath=path/to/file.txt runs application with provided file path

User Controls

Once the application is running, you can:

• Press the key 'q' to quit the application.
• Drag and move the mouse to rotate the shape about the upwards and rightwards axes. Horizontal movement rotates the mesh about the y (upward) axis, and vertical movement rotates the mesh about the x (rightwards) axis

Structure

Directories:

• src/: Contains the code for the functionality of the application
• data/: Contains CSV files for mesh objects. The CSV files are in the format specified in the assessment description

Python files

These python files are located in the src/ directory, and their purposes are described below

• mesh_renderer.py: Contains class to handle high level logic for the rendering application.
• mesh.py: Contains class to handle loading, transforming, and projecting a 3D mesh.
• window.py: Contains class to handle the user interface, including plotting.

Mesh File Format

Mesh objects can be read in from CSV files, such as the example ones provided in the data/ directory. The format of these files is as follows:

• The first line contains two integers. The first integer is the number of vertices that define the 3D object, and the second number is the number of faces that define the 3D object.
• Starting at the second line each line will define one vertex of the 3D object and will consist of an integer followed by three real numbers. The integer is the ID of the vertex and the three real numbers define the (x,y,z) coordinates of the vertex. The number of lines in this section will be equal to the first integer in the file.
• Following the vertex section will be a section defining the faces of the 3D object. The number of lines in this section will be equal to the second integer on the first line of the file. Each line in this section will consist of three integers that define a triangle that is a face of the object. The three integers each refer to the ID of a vertex from the second section of the file.