manifold for Mac

About Manifold

C++ Documentation | ManifoldCAD User Guide | JS/TS/WASM API | Algorithm Documentation | Blog Posts | Web Examples

Manifold is a geometry library dedicated to creating and operating on manifold triangle meshes. A manifold mesh is a mesh that represents a solid object, and so is very important in manufacturing, CAD, structural analysis, etc. Manifold also supports arbitrary vertex properties and enables mapping of materials for rendering use-cases. Our primary goal is reliability: guaranteed manifold output without caveats or edge cases. Our secondary goal is performance: efficient algorithms that make extensive use of parallelization, or pipelining when only a single thread is available.

Users

Here is an incomplete list of our users, whose integrations may be anywhere from in-progress to released. Please feel free to send a PR to update this list with your own project - it's quite difficult for us to keep track.

| 3D Model Print Simple Edit

Bindings & Packages

Manifold has bindings to many other languages, some maintained in this repository, and others elsewhere. It can also be built in C++ via vcpkg. There is also a native Rust port, manifold-rust, which passes Manifold's full test suite with identical results and has no C++ dependency — from a user's perspective it works like a binding.

Frontend Sandboxes

[ManifoldCAD.org]

If you like OpenSCAD / JSCAD, you might also like ManifoldCAD - our own solid modelling web app where you script in JS/TS. This uses our npm package, manifold-3d, built via WASM. It's not quite as fast as our raw C++, but it's hard to beat for interoperability.

[Python Colab Example]

If you prefer Python to JS/TS, make your own copy of the notebook. It demonstrates interop between our manifold3d PyPI library and the popular trimesh library, including showing the interactive model right in the notebook and saving 3D model output.

Manifold Library

This library is fast with guaranteed manifold output. As such you need manifold meshes as input, which this library can create using constructors inspired by the OpenSCAD API, as well as a level set function for evaluating signed-distance functions (SDF) that improves significantly over Marching Cubes. You can also pass in your own mesh data, but you'll get an error status if the imported mesh isn't manifold. We provide a Merge function to fix slightly non-manifold meshes, but in general you may need one of the automated repair tools that exist mostly for 3D printing.

The most significant contribution here is a guaranteed-manifold mesh Boolean algorithm, which I believe is the first of its kind. If you know of another, please open a discussion - a mesh Boolean algorithm robust to edge cases has been an open problem for many years. Likewise, if the Boolean here ever fails you, please submit an issue! This Boolean forms the basis of a CAD kernel, as it allows simple shapes to be combined into more complex ones.