Coindesigner is a RAD (rapid application development) system to build 3D applications using Coin3D openInventor. It allows to write simple 3D scenarios just using drag&drop, so users require no programming skills to use it.

Coindesigner was originally written by Jose M. Espadero and Tomas Aguado (2004-2008).

This set or programs is licensed under the GPL, please read the file https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html for more details about the license.

Please, note that executable files are also affected by the licenses of QT and Coin3D. Please, refer to their respective licenses for more details.

coindesigner is a system equivalent to Gtk-glade or Qt-designer, where we can choose components from the openInventor toolkit, add them somewhere in our scene and configure them in a very easy way... and all changes are applied to the scene on the fly!

The project also includes cdsview, a minimalistic external viewer that allows to distribute the scenarios without need of the RAD in most modern OS.

Some features of the tool are:

* Reads and write scenes in native openInventor file format (.iv)
* Can import geometry from VRML, 3DS, OFF (from geomview), SMF, 
    alias/wavefront(.obj), sphereTree (.sph) and XYZ point clouds file formats. 
* Exports geometry to VRML2, SMF, OBJ, STL, OFF and XYZ file formats.
* It includes cdsview, an minimalistic external viewer that allows
  you to view and distribute scenes without need of coindesigner.
* Allows to use manips to configure SpotLights, PointLights and 
  Transform nodes. Just use the right mouse button to interchange 
  between those nodes and his manip!
* GUI has been translated to English and Spanish, if you want to help
  us to translate to your languaje write the author. A translation work
  takes just about 90 minutes using Qt-Linguist.
* Includes the complete coin reference and several step by step
  tutorials directly brownsables from the application.
* Allow some operations as mesh reduction (with QSLIM), scene
  simplification (ivfix), mesh triangulation and convex hull
  computation.
* Support for volume rendering using SIM Voleon.
* It's open source released under GPL license. 

The coin3d reference and the step by step tutorials of coindesigner are now packed in separate files. You can download them from the downloads section in http://coindesigner.sourceforge.net and unpack in the same directory where the executable of coindesigner is. If reference directory is not found, coindesigner will try to access to an online version of the reference.

Default languaje is english. If you want to see coindesigner in your own languaje then you have to define the LANG enviroment variable to be one of EN (for English), ES (for Spanish) or PT (for Portuguese) and then run coindesigner. Please, ensure that the translation files (*.qs) are found in the current directory.

You will need this libraries installed and working:

• Qt version 4.3.2 or newer.
• Simage, Coin3D and SoQt.
• Dime, if you want support for DXF file format
• A standar C++ compiler and toolchain

Usually you can get this packages with the command:

apt-get install g++ bison flex make 
apt-get install libqt4-dev libsimage-dev libcoin80-dev libdime-dev libsoqt4-dev 

Optionally, you can use SIM Voleon to visualice volumetric data. Visit https://bitbucket.org/Coin3D/simvoleon to read how to download and install these libraries.

Clone the source from this reposity, and run make with the coindesigner.make file

git clone https://github.com/jmespadero/coindesigner.git
cd coindesigner
make -f coindesigner.make 

Alternatively, you can use cmake to build the program:

git clone https://github.com/jmespadero/coindesigner.git
mkdir coindesigner-build
cd coindesigner-build
cmake ../coindesigner
make   

To use the translation files, you must run coindesigner in the same directory that the coindesigner_your_language.qm file. Please ensure that the LANG enviroment variable is adecuate to your language.

The mesh reduction tool is based in QSlim, an algorithm designed and coded by Michael Garland. To use qslim, you must download it from the web http://mgarland.org/software/qslim21.html and put the executable of QSlim in the same directory of coindesigner (or elsewhere in the path). You will see if QSlim is available in the "help->about" menu.

Note: If you don't want to compile qslim, can download binaries from here: http://mgarland.org/software/qslim20.html

TetGen is a program to generate tetrahedral meshes of any 3D polyhedral domains. TetGen generates exact constrained Delaunay tetrahedralizations, boundary conforming Delaunay meshes, and Voronoi partitions. To use tetgen, you must download it from http://wias-berlin.de/software/tetgen and put the executable of tetgen in the same directory of coindesigner (or elsewhere in the path). You will see if tetgen is available in the "help->about" menu.

"If I have seen further, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants" (Isaac Newton, but I found it in Oscar Robles PhD) Well, most of my giants are working on the Modelling and Virtual Reality Group of the Rey Juan Carlos university. Their names are Marcos, Sofía, Oscar, Susana, Pablo, Luis, Angel, Luismi, Cesar, Carolina, and many more people that work in the group.

The 3ds importer is part of coin3d package and was developed by PC John. This piece of code is usually available when you compile coin3D with the "--enable-3ds" flags, which is not the default. To avoid everybody to have to recompile coin3d, we decided to incorporate those file to our project

Most icons used in coindesigner UI are part of Crystal Icons. This icon theme was created by Everaldo Coelho and the Crystal Artists Staff. Svg icons are from the tango project

Icons for sceneGraph nodes are based on "Dia Shapes for Open Inventor Scenegraphs", package, compiled by Alejandro Sierra.

The ivfix code used inside of coindesigner was originally written by the SGI crew, and released as GPL code in 2000.

The qslim program was written by Michael Garland and released under the GPL. The web of the author is http://mgarland.org

The convex hull calculator is based in QHullLib, which was writen by John W. Ratcliff. It is an adaptation of the qhull program to allow an easy way to use qhull routines using C++, without need to call any external program. It's not easy to find the standalone qhulllib code (due broken links :-( ), but it can be found inside ODFRocket, an open framework which has Copyright (c) 2004 Open Dynamics Framework Group. Please, read README_qhulllib.txt and README_qhull.txt for more details.

The CMakeLists.txt file necessary to build the app using cmake was written by Leopold Palomo-Avellaneda for his own fork of coindesigner.

Last but not least, many fragment of coindesigner are based on examples found in the Coin3D and Qt documentation. We would like to acknowledge that work and the help received from Lars J. Aas, Morten Eriksen and Peder Blekken from Kongsberg SIM (aka System in Motion) through the coin-discuss mail list. They are the Coin on Coindesigner.