You can use Fade2D/2.5D 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).
- In addition a commercial license is available for professional users. The Fade library has been designed for an industrial environment and thus is fast enough to triangulate many millions of points. Moreover Fade is robust, it is actively maintained and there is personal support.
Student license
Fade is not 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. In addition, if your research benefits from the project, it would be nice if you could also describe it there and mention it in social media.
- 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 few weeks 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
- quick error corrections and
- personal programming support.
The commercial license of Fade consists of the following parts:
- The Fade2D base component (mandatory): It covers 2D Delaunay triangulations, insertion of constraint segments (also known as breaklines), zones and the Segment Checker
- The Quality Mesh Generator (optional): Delaunay Meshing and Grid Meshing refines meshes to achieve well shaped triangles, see also Advanced Mesh Generation
- The Fade2.5D module (optional): The 2.5D version is ideal 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: For example ISO line computation, height queries with arbitrary (x,y) coordinates, point cloud simplification, smoothing, valley-ridge-optimization, the Cookie Cutter and 2.5D segment intersection checking. Further you can import and post-process pre-existing triangles.
- The Cut&Fill software for earthwork calculations (optional): Cut-And-Fill computes the volume between two overlapping TIN’s.
“Please contact the author for a commercial license. Describe your software project briefly and tell us which of the above Fade components you would like to use.”
Do not hesitate to ask for support with your code when you test the library.