Release notes for iso2mesh 0.9.9, aka 1.0-RC1

It has been a while since the previous release of iso2mesh. However, the development of this compact and versatile meshing toolbox has never stopped. Here, I would like to invite you to test out a much more stable/polished version, v0.9.9, as the release candidate for the upcoming 1.0 release of this toolbox. The packages can be downloaded at

http://iso2mesh.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/index.cgi?Download

This is going the only RC before the final release of 1.0. I would like to hear back from you if there is any outstanding issues when running this update for your data. If everything is going well and nothing serious needs to be fixed, I expect to make the final release of 1.0 in two to four weeks.

For those of you who are using the previous version, v0.9.8, this release packs with a couple of major improvements that might be worthwhile checking out:

1. iso2mesh now sets a seed for the random number generator used internally by all CGAL tools. This means when you run vol2mesh/v2m or vol2surf/v2s, your output mesh is expected to be reproducible when running for multiple times. This is very useful when you want to share your data/script with other people. (currently iso2mesh doesn't ensure the reproducibility when running across Windows and Unix-like systems)

2. the surface extraction tool, vol2surf or v2s, is now more robust when dealing with non-manifold geometries (previously it will run for a long time and terminate at maximum node limit).

3. meshing of primitive geometries were added, including supports for a sphere, a box, and an ellipsoid.

4. plotmesh is more intelligent in telling if a 4-column array is a tetrahedron list, or a face list with an extra column of flags. You simply run plotmesh(node,face) or plotmesh(node,elem).

5. most binaries are recompiled and compressed; support for intel Mac computer is now complete; 10 new scripts are added and a bunch of others are optimized.

The full ChangeLog can be found here

http://iso2mesh.sf.net/cgi-bin/index.cgi?Doc/ChangeLog

Please send your feedback to me by email, or post it on the web at

http://iso2mesh.sf.net/cgi-bin/index.cgi?action=edit&id=Tofu-RC1..discuss