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Can anyone recommend a good set of CGAL tutorials for beginners? I have tried to read the documentation but it seems very dense to me even as a moderately experienced C++ programmer. Therefore I'm trying to learn by solving simple problems but even that has been confusing. For example, the problem I am specifically trying to solve right now is the following: From a 3D point cloud, find the convex hull, then loop over the finite facets of the convex hull and print each facet's vertices. It seems like there should be a straightforward way to do this; I would have expected that 3D polyhedra would own a vector of facet objects, each of which in turn would own a vector of its edges, each of which in turn would own a vector of its vertices, and that their would be some access through this hierarchy using iterators. But so far I have been unable to find a simple way to navigate through this hierarchy (if it exists).

Jeff Bullard
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    Yes, CGAL is hard and confusing in the beginning. Have you tried looking into University courses that have this ? Mine had some good tutorials but they are not open. – grasshopper Jul 01 '13 at 16:23
  • CGAL comes with quite a few demos and examples, looking at those (and then starting to modify them) is the best way to learn. – Marc Glisse Jul 01 '13 at 17:18
  • I agree with @MarcGlisse. In addtion, you could try posting specific questions here as well. Try to make them as focused as possible, that is, each question would focus on one component that you fail to accomplish. – Dror Jul 01 '13 at 20:18

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You can start with this tutorial http://cel.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/34/04/48/PDF/whole-course.pdf

Take a look also at these videos http://www.cgal.org/videos.html

For your specific problem take a look at http://www.cgal.org/Manual/latest/doc_html/cgal_manual/Convex_hull_3/Chapter_main.html http://www.cgal.org/Tutorials/Polyhedron/

Nicola Pezzotti
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