CGAL users discussion list

[Iordan Iordanov <>]

Hello dear CGAL community,

It has been a long time! I hope you are all well.

I am reaching out with a question that might be a little unusual. We are working on a project with Unreal Engine 5 (UE5). We have generated a set of points inside UE5, and now we need to use these points to reconstruct a surface with equilateral triangles. We are trying to use CGAL, but there are some problems.

Concretely, we are working on Windows 11, and this is the process that we have followed, according to the CGAL documentation:

1. Install vcpkg and CGAL:
    * Clone the vcpkg repository: git clone https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg
    * Navigate to the vcpkg directory: cd vcpkg
    * Run the bootstrap script: .\bootstrap-vcpkg.bat
2. Install the required packages:
    * .\vcpkg.exe install yasm-tool:x86-windows
    * .\vcpkg.exe install cgal:x64-windows
3. Copy libraries into Unreal Project files:
    * Copy the following directories:
        vcpkg/installed/x64-windows/include/CGAL to UEProjectFiles/ThirdParty/CGAL
        vcpkg/installed/x64-windows/include/boost to UEProjectFiles/ThirdParty/boost
4. Modify the .Build.cs files in Unreal Engine to add the ThirdParty path:
        private string ThirdPartyPath { get { return Path.GetFullPath(Path.Combine(ModuleDirectory, "../../ThirdParty/")); } }
        PublicIncludePaths.AddRange( new string[] { Path.Combine(ThirdPartyPath, "CGAL"), Path.Combine(ThirdPartyPath, "boost") } );

 
After that, when trying to include the CGAL headers in our code:
#include "CGAL/Surface_mesh.h"
we get this error:

"Cannot open include file: 'CGAL/Surface_mesh.h': No such file or directory"

We had the suspicion that the problem comes from Unreal Engine, so we put all of the ThirdParty libraries into
ProjectFiles/Source/CGAL
ProjectFiles/Source/boost

However, then we got many error messages like 'CGAL_NOT_HEADER_ONLY' is not defined. I am attaching a couple of screenshots here.

Any hint would be highly appreciated, if you have ever come across anything similar.

Greetings from Tokyo,

---

Iordan Iordanov, PhD

CTO, Corpy&Co.

+81 (0) 80 9976 1233

https://imiordanov.github.io