Published in
Oct 6, 2020
Mesh Viewer is a simple open source STL/OBJ CAD geometry and surface mesh viewer prototype with a Model View Controller (MVC) type design. Three different visualization backends are compared and embedded within the same Python TkInter GUI framework.
- matplotlib
- plotly (WebGL with embedded webview)
- vispy (OpenGL)
The vispy/opengl backend seems to be the best choice overall with respect to performance and packaged size (~35 MB), while plotly (subjectively) looks the best but leads to large binaries due to embedding the Chromium framework (~70–90 MB), matplotlib is the simplest backend but suffers from slow performance for larger visualizations.
Source code is available from:
https://github.com/precise-simulation/mesh-viewer
and pre-built binaries from the releases:
