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Assimp Mesh Loader
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The most painstaking task in computer graphics has to do with loading assets.
Fortunately, Open Asset Import Library `Assimp`_ was created to tackle this very
problem.  Assimp is a portable library that imports various 3D model formats in
a uniform manner.

.. _Assimp: http://www.assimp.org

There are two ways to go about using this library:

- Incorporate it into the code base i.e. if it does not work on a platform,
  it's the end of the line unless the Assimp developers adjust it.

- Use it to convert all existing 3D model formats into a customized minimal
  3D model format.

Clearly the latter is better since it's restricting the third party library to
the tools pipeline.

.. code:: bash

   mkdir <assimp>/build <assimp>/install
   cd <assimp>/build
   ccmake -DENABLE_BOOST_WORKAROUND=ON -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=<assimp>/install ..
   make -j8
   make install

   cd <assimp>/port/PyAssimp
   python setup.py sdist
   pip install dist/pyassimp-0.1.tar.gz

Using Assimp's Python bindings is as simple as

.. code:: python

   import pyassimp
   import pyassimp.postprocess

If an error along the line of **assimp library not found** occurs, then most
likely :file:`<assimp>/port/PyAssimp/pyassimp/helper.py` failed to find the
location of the Assimp libraries.  One solution is to set the appropriate path
in that file via

.. code:: python

   additional_dirs, ext_whitelist = ['<assimp>/install/lib/'],[]

Another possible error has to do with
**libstdc++.so.6: version `CXXABI_1.3.8' not found**.  To check whether a
shared library has such a declaration, run

.. code:: bash

   strings /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6 | grep CXXABI

One solution is to replace the problematic library with a shared library that
contains said declaration.