README.md

November 29, 2022 ยท View on GitHub

Build PyMeshLab

Build scripts

We provide a set of platform dependent scripts that should make easier to build PyMeshLab. Scripts can be found here. Otherwise, if you want to build manually PyMeshLab, you can follow these instructions.

Source code

The main CMakeLists.txt file is placed in the root directory of this repository.

The C++ source code of pymeshlab is contained inside the src/pymeshlab directory. To see how it is organized, see the contained README.md. Inside the src directory there are also two directories:

  • meshlab: contains the subrepository of MeshLab;
  • utilities: contains some utilities necessary to deploy pymeshlab on specific platforms.

Requirements

To be built, PyMeshLab requires a C++14 compiler (gcc, clang and MSVC are supported), CMake >= 3.18, Python >= 3.7 and Qt = 5.15. There are also some other platform-dependedent dependencies, that can be installed easily using package managers (apt-get, brew and choco). For more details, see the script 0_setup_env.h contained into the directory scripts/[platform]/. For Windows, note that we use a bash script, therefore it needs to be run in a Linux subsystem environment.

Clone

Clone this repository with the --recursive flag, needed to clone also MeshLab and pybind11:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/cnr-isti-vclab/PyMeshLab.git

Build

To build PyMeshLab, just run:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -GNinja ..
ninja
ninja install

By default, PyMeshLab will be installed inside the pymeshlab directory of the repo. Therefore, after installed, you can just cd to the root of this repository and then import pymeshlab from a python shell.

Build options

By default, the scripts listed above will build a pymeshlab python module. There are two additional options in the CMake configuration:

  • PYMESHLAB_BUILD_DEBUG (default: OFF): if set to ON, pymeshlab will be built in debug mode, and instead of building pymeshlab/main.cpp, the file pymeshlab/debug_main.cpp will be built . This file contains a main function set to call pymeshlab functions under C++ and therefore allows to debug pymeshlab under a full C++ environment;
  • PYMESHLAB_UPDATE_DOC (default: OFF): if set to ON, pymeshlab will be built but with pymeshlab/doc_main.cpp instead of pymeshlab/main.cpp. This build system will generate an executable that will automatically update the file docs/filter_list.rst, containing the documentation of the pymeshlab filter.

Deploy PyMeshLab

By executing the above instructions, the installed pymeshlab directory will not be a self-contained pymeshlab directory (it will depend on Qt libs that are installed in the system). To make pymeshlab portable, we provide some scripts that you can find in the scripts directory in the root of this repo.

sh scripts/[platform]/1_build.sh
sh scripts/[platform]/2_deploy.sh

For more details, please take a look at the relative readme and at the Github Actions Workflows that use them to automatically build PyMeshLab in all the platforms.