CAD STL/OBJ mesh viewer with Python/tkinter GUI

#python #cad #mesh #tkinter

Mesh Viewer is a simple 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:

https://github.com/precise-simulation/mesh-viewer/releases/latest