ddg-exercises

This repo contains C++ skeleton code for course assignments from Discrete Differential Geometry (15-458/858).

For the JavaScript version, see https://github.com/cmu-geometry/ddg-exercises-js.

This code framework uses Geometry Central for geometry processing utilities and Polyscope for visualization, which were developed by Nick Sharp and others in the Geometry Collective. Extensive documentation for these libraries ---and how to build them on various platforms--- can be found at the preceding links. If you're having trouble building, please make sure to take a look before bugging the TAs! :-) (We are of course still very happy to help if you're still having trouble.)

Documentation for Geometry Central can be found here.

Documentation for Polyscope can be found here here.

Getting started

Clone the repository and its submodules.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/GeometryCollective/ddg-exercises
cd ddg-exercises/projects

Each project in ddg-exercises/projects builds its own executable when compiled. To run a particular project <project>, go to the projects/<project> directory. The basic process for compiling is as follows. First, make a build directory and compile using

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j4

This builds an executable main which can then be run using

bin/main <optional_path_to_a_mesh>

If you would like to add your own remote repository,

git remote add origin <url_of_remote_repository>

or change the url of an existing remote repo named 'origin' via

git remote set-url origin <new_url>

Then you should be able to push your commits to your remote repo. (For more extensive documentation to fit your needs, see git-remote documentation.)

Please make your repo(s) private to protect academic integrity! As mentioned by the course grading policy, "Duplicate work turned in by two different students will be considered cheating by both students" -- meaning if another student copies your code off your public repo, you will both get zeros for the course :((.

"Release" vs "Debug" mode

By default, the projects will compile in "Release" mode. While implementing these exercises, you may find it helpful to compile in "Debug" mode, which will enable more sanity checks in the code and print out more descriptive error messages, at the cost of somewhat less efficient performance. You can compile in Debug mode by using

cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug ..

You can explicitly tell CMake to compile in Release mode by using

cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..

Dependencies (all included)

Geometry processing and linear algebra - Geometry Central, which in turn has dependencies on Eigen and/or Suitesparse.
Visualization - Polyscope
Unit tests - Google Test