Perseverance - a history of Manifold
7 minute read. If I had known it would take this long, would I have started? This is a question I asked myself when looking back at the development of Manifold , and I honestly don't know the answer. Certainly taking on this challenge was born largely of naivety in software engineering, especially when realizing I worked on it for almost eight years before it saw the light of day. Why did I take on this project? It started with 3D printing, where I found out that much of the lack of reliability stemmed from models that had non-manifold mesh data. Manifoldness is what allows a mesh to represent a solid, with a clear inside and outside, so without this the computer is left to guess what your intentions are. In many cases there is simply no clear way for an algorithm to proceed when it encounters a non-manifold mesh. At first I thought these non-manifold meshes were simply the result of bugs, but while working at Microsoft I got to work with experts from many of the major CAD and m