Fade is distributed under two licenses:
- The free student license is already included in the download. Use it for non-commercial scientific research and for time limited commercial evaluation purposes (see below).
- The commercial license for professional users. Fade2D/2.5D has been designed for an industrial environment. Fade is fast enough to triangulate many millions of points: It is robust, it is actively maintained and there is support.
Student license
Fade is not a free software. But the student license is free of charge for personal non-commercial scientific research and you can use it without registration. When you use Fade in your software,
- Please put a link to Fade on your research page or your project homepage.
- Describe and cite Fade in scientific publications for which you have used it.
- Make sure that others do not use the software in a commercial setting.
It is common and permissible to use the included student license even in commercial development for a short time for the initial tests. But if you are developing with Fade for a longer period of time, please contact us for an evaluation license.
Commercial license
All other applications, including commercial in-house usage, require a commercial license which has the advantage of maintenance, error corrections and personal support. The commercial license of Fade consists of several parts:
- The Fade2D base component (mandatory): It covers 2D Delaunay triangulations, constrained Delaunay triangulations (insertion of segments) and the Segment Checker
- The Quality Mesh Generator (optional): Delaunay Meshing and Grid Meshing refines meshes to achieve well shaped triangles. You might have a look at the article Advanced Mesh Generation
- The Fade2.5D extension (optional): This is for 2.5D point clouds i.e., for terrains and other height fields: Points have (x,y,z)-coordinates and there is a bunch of additional algorithms like ISO line computation, height queries, point cloud simplification, valley-ridge-optimization, 2.5D segment checking. Existing triangles can be imported and trimmed.
- The Cut&Fill software for earthwork calculations (optional): Cut-And-Fill computes the volume between two overlapping TIN’s.
For a commercial license please contact the author. Please describe your software project briefly and tell us which fade components you would like to use.