external: it contains a series of external libraries needed by several plugins. Some of these libraries are compiled before the compilation of meshlab, if a corresponding system library is not found and then linked; other are header-only libraries that are just included by some plugins.
common: a series of utility functions used by MeshLab and its plugins.
meshlab: GUI and core of MeshLab.
meshlabserver: a tool that allows to compute mesh operations through command line
meshlabplugins: all the plugins that can be added to MeshLab.

The following folders are used by cmake:

cmake;
templates.

Build MeshLab

MeshLab builds with the three major compilers: gcc, clang, and msvc. It requires Qt >= 5.12, with xmlpatterns as additional package.

After setting up the Qt environment:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/cnr-isti-vclab/meshlab
mkdir meshlab/src/build
cd meshlab/src/build
cmake ..
make

You can also use QtCreator to build meshlab:

Install QtCreator and Qt >= 5.12 with xmlpatterns as additional package;
Open CMakeLists.txt inside src;
Select your favourite shadow build directory;
Build meshlab.

MeshLab has a plugin architecture and therefore all the plugins are compiled separately; some of them are harder to be compiled. Don't worry: if a plugin fails to compile, just remove it and you lose just that functionality.

Platform specific notes

On osx some plugins exploit openmp parallelism (screened poisson, isoparametrization) so you need a compiler supporting it and the clang provided by xcode does not support openmp. You can install all the required libraries by running the following command in a terminal:

brew install llvm libomp

On Windows, we suggest to build meshlab using QtCreator. Before trying to build, you should:

install VisualStudio >= 2017 with the C++ developement package;
install Qt >= 5.12 and QtCreator.

then, open the CMakeLists.txt file and try to build MeshLab.