TMB Codec

TMB1 (Triangle Mesh Binary) is a compact general-purpose triangle-mesh codec. The library provides one C ABI across Windows, macOS, Linux, and WebAssembly. Native CI builds use Clang (clang-cl on Windows and clang++ elsewhere).

Features

• Float32 bit-exact lossless positions
• Quantized positions from 1 through 31 bits
• Optional restoration of vertex IDs, face IDs, and triangle corner rotation
• Single-file C++17 implementation
• No runtime dependency on Zstd; compress the completed TMB1 bundle once outside the codec when using tmb1-zstd-v1

Applications that require stable per-vertex data use TMB_VERTEX_IDS (flags=1). This restores vertex rows and triangle references to original vertex IDs while allowing face row order and cyclic starting corners to remain in traversal order.

Python

Install a prebuilt native wheel:

pip install tmb-codec

from tmb_codec import decode, encode

data = encode(vertices, faces, bits=14)
decoded_vertices, decoded_faces = decode(data)

lossless = encode(vertices, faces, bits=None)

Wheels contain the Python API, the platform-native shared library, and license notices. They do not contain src/tmb_codec.cpp or an sdist.

Native build

Windows:

cmake -S . -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=clang-cl -DTMB_BUILD_TESTS=ON
cmake --build build --parallel
ctest --test-dir build --output-on-failure

macOS and Linux:

cmake -S . -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=clang++ -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DTMB_BUILD_TESTS=ON
cmake --build build --parallel
ctest --test-dir build --output-on-failure

WebAssembly with Emscripten:

emcmake cmake -S . -B build-wasm -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DTMB_BUILD_TESTS=OFF
cmake --build build-wasm --parallel
node tests/wasm_smoke.mjs build-wasm/tmb_codec.js

The WASM build emits tmb_codec.js and tmb_codec.wasm with memory growth enabled and exports the five public TMB functions plus malloc/free.

Every push and pull request builds and installs native wheels on Windows, macOS, and Linux and runs the Python tests against those installed wheels. WASM has a separate Node.js round-trip test. Pushing a v* tag publishes wheels to PyPI and then creates a GitHub Release only after every required job succeeds.

C API

#include <tmb_codec.h>

unsigned char* bytes = nullptr;
size_t byte_count = 0;
double timings[3] = {};
int result = tmb_encode_quantized(
    vertices, vertex_count,
    faces, face_count,
    TMB_VERTEX_IDS, 14,
    &bytes, &byte_count, timings);
if (result == TMB_OK) {
    // Send zstd(bytes[0:byte_count]) or store the raw TMB1 bundle.
    tmb_free(bytes);
}

Inputs are contiguous float[V][3] positions and uint32_t[F][3] triangle indices. Encoder output is allocated by the codec and must be released with tmb_free. Decoder output arrays are allocated by the caller.

Format

TMB1 starts with ten little-endian uint32 values:

1. Magic TMB1
2. Format version 1
3. Flags
4. Vertex count
5. Face count
6. Topology section size
7. Position section size
8. Vertex-ID section size
9. Face-ID section size
10. Corner-rotation section size

Quantized streams set flag bit 8 and store the coordinate bit count in flag bits 16 through 20. Their position section begins with four little-endian float64 values: origin x/y/z and a common extent. Coordinates from 1 through 16 bits use one integer component per axis. Coordinates from 17 through 31 bits use low/high 16-bit components to keep prediction residuals inside signed 32-bit range.

The topology and position entropy streams are defined by the reference source in src/tmb_codec.cpp. Consumers should use the provided encoder and decoder unless they also maintain compatibility tests against the reference implementation.

License

The codec incorporates and modifies MIT-licensed Corto code. Preserve licenses/CORTO_LICENSE.txt with source and binary distributions. Project-level terms are in LICENSE; third-party attribution is in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.