Crate imlet

Imlet

Imlet (Implicit Modeling Lightweight Exploration Toolkit) is a lightweight and flexible engine for creating 3D geometries through implicit modeling, written in Rust. It enables the construction of compound spatial functions that can be evaluated and polygonized to generate geometries.

Overview

Imlet provides tools for defining and combining distance functions, extracting isosurfaces, and exporting the results. At its core, it offers a high-level interface for implicit modeling, including:

Key Features

• Functional Modeling: Create geometries by combining distance functions (e.g., spheres, toruses) and operations (e.g., intersections, unions).
• Geometric Types: Provides core geometric types, like Vec3, Plane, Mesh, and more.
• Custom Distance Functions: Define distance functions mathematically or derive them from external triangle meshes.
• Field Sampling: Both dense and sparse field sampling for handling large domains.
• Iso-surfacing: Efficient iso-surface extraction from discretized scalar fields using marching cubes.
• Mesh Export/Import: Export results to .obj files or import external .obj files to create custom distance functions.

Optional Feature Flags

• serde: Save and load implicit models using the .json format for easy sharing and reuse.
• viewer: Visualize mesh outputs quickly using the viewer feature built on top of wgpu.

The main modules of the crate are types::geometry and types::computation, which together form the foundation for creating and manipulating implicit models. At the heart of Imlet is the ImplicitModel struct, which represents the computation graph used for modeling.

Example: Creating a Simple Geometry

Here’s a basic example demonstrating how to use Imlet to combine a sphere and a gyroid using an intersection operation:

// Define the model parameters
let size = 10.0;
let cell_size = 0.1;
let bounds = BoundingBox::new(Vec3::origin(), Vec3::new(size, size, size));

// Create an implicit model
let mut model = ImplicitModel::new();

// Add a sphere to the model
let sphere = model
    .add_function(
        "Sphere",
        Sphere::new(Vec3::new(0.5 * size, 0.5 * size, 0.5 * size), 0.45 * size))
    .unwrap();

// Add a gyroid function to the model
let gyroid = model
    .add_function("Gyroid", Gyroid::with_equal_spacing(2.5, true))
    .unwrap();

// Combine the sphere and gyroid using a Boolean intersection
let intersection = model
    .add_operation(
        "Intersection",
        BooleanIntersection::new(),
        Some(&[&sphere, &gyroid]))
    .unwrap();

// Sample a sparse field and generate an iso-surface.
let config = SparseFieldConfig::default()
    .set_cell_size(cell_size);

let mut sampler = SparseSampler::builder()
    .with_bounds(bounds)                        // Set the bounds for the sampling.
    .with_config(config)                        // Set the sparse field parameters.
    .build()
    .expect("Should be able to build the sampler.");

sampler
    .sample_field(&model)
    .expect("Sampling should work.");

let mesh = sampler
    .iso_surface(0.0)
    .expect("Extracting iso-surface should work.");

write_obj_file(&mesh, "interpolation_example").unwrap();

For more examples and detailed API documentation, see:

• The examples/ directory in the repository
• The types::computation module for model building
• The types::geometry module for geometric primitives

Modules

algorithms

Algorithms for iso-surface extraction.

types

Types for building and processing implicit models.

utils

Utility modules for file I/O, logging, and math operations.

viewer

Optional viewer for visualizing generated geometries.

Constants

IMLET_VERSION

The current version of the Imlet library.