The CGAL Open Source Project is pleased to announce the release 5.0 Beta 1
of CGAL, the Computational Geometry Algorithms Library.
CGAL version 5.0 Beta 1 is a public testing release. It should provide
a solid ground to report bugs that need to be tackled before the
release of the final version of CGAL 5.0 in October.
CGAL 5.0 is the first release of CGAL that requires a C++ compiler
with the support of C++14 or later. The new list of supported
compilers is:
- Visual C++ 14.0 (from Visual Studio 2015 Update 3) or later,
- Gnu g++ 6.3 or later (on Linux or MacOS),
- LLVM Clang version 8.0 or later (on Linux or MacOS), and
- Apple Clang compiler versions 7.0.2 and 10.0.1 (on MacOS).
Since CGAL 4.9, CGAL can be used as a header-only library, with
dependencies. Since CGAL 5.0, that is now the default, unless
specified differently in the (optional) CMake configuration.
Besides fixes and general enhancement to existing packages, the following
has changed since CGAL 4.14:
Polygonal Surface Reconstruction (new package)
-
This package provides a method for piecewise planar object
reconstruction from point clouds. The method takes as input an
unordered point set sampled from a piecewise planar object and
outputs a compact and watertight surface mesh interpolating the
input point set. The method assumes that all necessary major planes
are provided (or can be extracted from the input point set using the
shape detection method described in Point Set Shape Detection, or
any other alternative methods).The method can handle arbitrary
piecewise planar objects and is capable of recovering sharp features
and is robust to noise and outliers. See also the associated blog
entry:https://www.cgal.org/2019/08/05/Polygonal_surface_reconstruction/
Shape Detection (major changes)
-
BREAKING CHANGE: The concept ShapeDetectionTraits has been renamed
to EfficientRANSACTraits. -
BREAKING CHANGE: The Shape_detection_3 namespace has been renamed to
Shape_detection. -
Added a new, generic implementation of region growing. This enables
for example applying region growing to inputs such as 2D and 3D
point sets, or models of the FaceGraph concept. Learn more about
this new algorithm with this blog entry:
dD Geometry Kernel
- A new exact kernel, Epeck_d, is now available.
2D and 3D Triangulations
-
BREAKING CHANGE: Several deprecated functions and classes have been
removed. See the full list of breaking changes in the release
notes. -
BREAKING CHANGE: The constructor and the insert() function of
CGAL::Triangulation_2 or CGAL::Triangulation_3 which take a range
of points as argument are now guaranteed to insert the points
following the order of InputIterator. Note that this change only
affects the base class CGAL::Triangulation_[23] and not any
derived class, such as CGAL::Delaunay_triangulation_[23].
Polygon Mesh Processing
- Introduced a wide range of new functions related to location of
queries on a triangle mesh, such as
CGAL::Polygon_mesh_processing::locate(Point, Mesh). The location of
a point on a triangle mesh is expressed as the pair of a face and
the barycentric coordinates of the point in this face, enabling
robust manipulation of locations (for example, intersections of two
3D segments living within the same face). - Added the mesh smoothing function smooth_mesh(), which can be used
to improve the quality of triangle elements based on various
geometric characteristics. - Added the shape smoothing function smooth_shape(), which can be used
to smooth the surface of a triangle mesh, using the mean curvature
flow to perform noise removal.
Point Set Processing
- BREAKING CHANGE: the API using iterators and overloads for optional
parameters (deprecated since CGAL 4.12) has been removed. The
current (and now only) API uses ranges and Named Parameters.
See https://www.cgal.org/2019/09/30/cgal50-beta1/ for a complete list of
changes.