Stickkit

A command-line tool for manipulating segmented vector geometry in 2D or 3D space

Introduction

Stickkit is a command-line tool for manipulating segmented vector geometry in 2D or 3D space. It is a single ANSI C file and requires no special libraries to build on most machines. It fills a gap that I found in command-line geometry processing software: a tool designed specifically for segmented geometries (graphs and networks). Since writing this, geos now performs many of these operations.

Note that similar software is available for three-dimesional triangle meshes: first my own Rocktools, and also the very powerful tool Meshlab---a GUI triangle mesh manipulation tool that can read and write a number of formats, plus perform a large variety of smoothing and simplification operations. Files

Get and build

The current version of Stickkit is 0.5. On a Linux or OSX system, build it with:

sudo dnf install wxGTK3-devel wxsvg-devel
git clone https://github.com/markstock/stickkit.git
cd stickkit
make

or, to cross-compile for Windows on Linux, use:

/usr/local/bin/i386-mingw32-gcc -O2 -o stickkit.exe stickkit.c -lm

Features

Stickkit can do a few interesting things:

• Reads Wavefront-.obj-like files (which I call ".seg" to differentiate from the tri-mesh standard) with tangents and radii and reads Radiance lists of cylinders, cones, and spheres.
• All node locations, tangent vectors, and radii are dynamically stored in a binary tree and duplicate entries are quickly found and removed, so meshes using 10-20 million segments load, process, and write relatively fast.
• Basic operations include multi-axis scaling and translation.
• Coarsen operation removes nodes such that all segments have a minimum length. New nodes are placed according to spline interpolation of the original paths.
• Likewise, the refine operation adds new nodes along spline-interpolated paths such that no segment exceeds a maximum length.
• Roughen operation displaces each node according to a Gaussian (diffusion-like) distribution.
• Split operation splits input geometry smoothly along its longest axis and writes two separate files.
• Most operations can be stacked, for example: -coarsen 0.01 -roughen 0.3 -refine .005 -roughen 0.3 -refine .002 -roughen 0.3 and will be performed in order.
• VTK files can be opened in ParaView, an open source scientific visualization package from Kitware/ASC/Sandia/LANL/ARL. Most of the images below were made using ParaView.

To do

• Allow writing of accurate png files
• Use the command-line options from rockxray for aiming
• Use the voxel stuff from bob.c for pixel values
• Use png-writing code from rockxray for the output
• Get stickkit to dump .rad segments and nodes as 10 different "def6"-type things
• That way, I can turn def0 into "light" and the others into "glow"

Citing Stickkit

I don't get paid for writing or maintaining this, so if you find this tool useful or mention it in your writing, please please cite it by using the following BibTeX entry.

@Misc{Stickkit2017,
  author =       {Mark J.~Stock},
  title =        {Stickkit:  A command-line tool for manipulating segmented vector geometry in 2D or 3D space},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/markstock/stickkit}},
  year =         {2017}
}