render_mesh: Render a 3D mesh to an image

In scimesh: Headless Publication-Quality 3D Mesh Rendering Engine

Render a 3D mesh to an image

Description

Renders a single mesh using the scimesh software renderer. The mesh can be specified either as separate vertices/triangles matrices, as a scimesh mesh descriptor list, or as an rgl tmesh3d-style list (with vb/it components). rgl meshes are transparently converted via mesh_from_rgl().

Usage

render_mesh(
  vertices,
  triangles = NULL,
  colors = NULL,
  face_colors = NULL,
  normals = NULL,
  uv = NULL,
  texture = NULL,
  camera = NULL,
  options = render_options()
)

Arguments

vertices	Either an Nx3 numeric matrix of vertex positions, or a scimesh mesh descriptor list (with vertices and triangles components), or an rgl-style list (with vb and it components).
triangles	Mx3 integer matrix of triangle indices (1-based). Ignored when vertices is a list.
colors	Optional Nx4 numeric matrix of RGBA vertex colors (0-1). Use face_colors (Mx4) for per-triangle colours instead.
face_colors	Optional Mx4 numeric matrix of per-face RGBA colors, one row per triangle. When present, all three vertices of a triangle use the same colour. Takes precedence over vertex colors.
normals	Optional Nx3 numeric matrix of vertex normals.
uv	Optional Nx2 numeric matrix of texture coordinates (0-1).
texture	Optional texture image as a 3D array (H x W x 3 or 4) with values in [0, 1], e.g. from png::readPNG().
camera	A camera list from camera() or camera_auto().
options	A render options list from render_options().

Value

A list with components width, height, and pixels (raw vector of RGBA values).

Examples

# Render a simple colored triangle
verts <- matrix(c(0, 0, 0,  1, 0, 0,  0.5, 1, 0), ncol = 3, byrow = TRUE)
tris  <- matrix(1L, nrow = 1, ncol = 3)
cols  <- matrix(c(1, 0, 0, 1,  0, 1, 0, 1,  0, 0, 1, 1), ncol = 4, byrow = TRUE)
img <- render_mesh(verts, tris, colors = cols)
tmp_file <- tempfile(fileext = ".png")
write_png(img, tmp_file)

# Render from a mesh descriptor list (scimesh format)
mesh_desc <- list(vertices = verts, triangles = tris, colors = cols)
img <- render_mesh(mesh_desc)

scimesh documentation built on Aug. 9, 2026, 9:07 a.m.