scimesh: Headless Publication-Quality 3D Mesh Rendering Engine

A fast, GPU-free 3D software renderer written in modern C++17 with native R bindings. Renders triangle meshes to publication-quality images entirely on the CPU, requiring no display server or graphics hardware. Features multi-light Blinn-Phong shading, screen-space ambient occlusion, anti-aliasing, depth fog, transparency, wireframe rendering, texture mapping, and procedural geometry generation. Supports standard mesh file formats with PNG and PPM output. Works on high-performance computing clusters, headless servers, containers, and continuous integration pipelines, making it suitable for scientific visualization across neuro-imaging, molecular structures, and general 3D graphics.

Version: 0.3.0
Imports: Rcpp (≥ 1.0.0)
LinkingTo: Rcpp
Suggests: testthat (≥ 3.0.0), png, freesurferformats, viridisLite, knitr, rmarkdown
Published: 2026-08-09
DOI: 10.32614/CRAN.package.scimesh (may not be active yet)
Author: Tim Schäfer [aut, cre], Martin Hořeňovský [ctb] (Author of Catch2 (cpp_tests/catch_amalgamated.{h,cpp})), Christophe Riccio [ctb] (Author of GLM - OpenGL Mathematics (src/third_party/glm/)), Dimitri Diakopoulos [ctb] (Author of tinyply (src/third_party/tinyply.{h,cpp})), Syoyo Fujita [ctb] (Author of tinyobjloader (src/third_party/tiny_obj_loader.h)), Tim Schäfer [ctb] (Author of libfs (src/third_party/libfs.h)), Sebastian Reiter [ctb] (Author of stl_reader (src/third_party/stl_reader.h)), Sean Barrett [ctb] (Author of stb libraries (src/third_party/stb_image*.h))
Maintainer: Tim Schäfer <ts+code at rcmd.org>
BugReports: https://github.com/dfsp-spirit/scimesh/issues
License: MIT + file LICENSE
URL: https://github.com/dfsp-spirit/scimesh
NeedsCompilation: yes
SystemRequirements: C++17
CRAN checks: scimesh results

Documentation:

Reference manual: scimesh.html , scimesh.pdf
Vignettes: Getting Started with scimesh (source, R code)

Downloads:

Package source: scimesh_0.3.0.tar.gz
Windows binaries: r-devel: not available, r-release: not available, r-oldrel: not available
macOS binaries: r-release (arm64): not available, r-oldrel (arm64): not available, r-release (x86_64): not available, r-oldrel (x86_64): not available

Linking:

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