Mesh-to-SDF converter

Given a (potentially nasty, nonconvex) mesh, automatically creates an SDF file that describes that object. The visual geometry is pointed to the input mesh, and the collision geometry is pointed to a convex decomposition of the input mesh (as performed by trimesh and vhacd.

This has been designed to interoperate well with Drake, but doesn't strictly need it.

Dependencies

For just basic conversion:

argparse lxml numpy trimesh

and you need testVHACD on your PATH. I use the procedure from this script to get it.

The visualization utility requires Drake.

Usage

To perform the conversion (here, on an example mesh with a 1000x downscaling):

python generate_sdf_from_mesh.py test_data/bowl_6p25in.obj --scale 0.001 --preview

If you have Drake installed, you can inspect the resulting SDF (use the menu at the right to show/hide the visual and collision mesh components):

python inspect_sdf_in_meshcat.py test_data/bowl_6p25in.sdf

Both can be invoked with --help to see additional arguments.