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 there for professional users. The Fade library has been designed for an industrial environment and thus it is fast enough to triangulate many millions of points. Moreover Fade is numerically 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 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.
- 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.
“Please contact us for a commercial license. Describe your software project briefly and tell us which of the below Fade components you would like to use.”
Do not hesitate to ask for support with your code when you test the library.
License components
The commercial license of Fade consists of the following parts:
- The Fade2D base component (mandatory): It covers 2D Delaunay triangulations, constraint edges, zones and the Segment Checker. Triangulations and zones can be saved and reloaded.
- 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 instance point cloud reduction, ISO line computation, height queries like z=getHeight(x,y), smoothing, valley/ridge edge-flips to adapt a triangulation to a terrain, the Cookie Cutter, draping line segments onto a surface and 2.5D segment intersection checking. Further you can import and post-process pre-existing triangles.
- The Quality Mesh Generator (optional): Delaunay Meshing and Grid Meshing refines meshes to achieve well shaped triangles, see also Advanced Mesh Generation
- The Cut&Fill software for earthwork volume calculations (optional): Cut-And-Fill computes the volume between two overlapping triangulations (TIN’s).