Roadmap to the VripPack directory tree

Below is a description of the directory structure of the VripPack distribution.

include/

When you unpack vrippack, this contains one include file (mostly macros), but a bunch of other include files get created as symbolic links during the first make.

lib/

This contains links to the essential libraries which live in the src directories after successful compilation

bin/

This contains links to all the binaries that created after successful compilation. Be sure to include this in your path.

src/

The source tree.

src/linear/

Vector and matrix classes and routines used by a number of the other tools.

src/libply/

PLY polygon mesh format library.

src/plytools/

A suite of useful tools for manipulating PLY files. Click here for a summary of what each program does (generated by plyusages.csh).

src/softrender/

Code for resampling range images into floating point depth maps (essentially Z-buffers) that can be used by vrip for efficient processing. This code is practically unintelligble.

src/vrip/

The core software that reads in range images and merges them into a run-length encoded volume. Click here for a roadmap to that code.

src/march/

Marching Cubes code that extracts a triangle mesh from a run-length encoded volume.

src/plyclean/

Code for cleaning up Marching Cubes meshes. In short, Marching Cubes can generate triangles with arbitrarily small edges, and this code is used to collapse triangles with edges below a certain tolerance.

src/pvrip/

Tools for handling large datasets. Breaks the data and the volume into manageable blocks and, optionally, distributes the blocks among multiple processors on multiple machines. This toolset is, at the moment, not documented.