The deal.II Readme on interfacing to OpenCASCADE

Installation of OpenCASCADE

OpenCASCADE is a software development kit (SDK) intended for development of applications dealing with 3D CAD data, freely available in open source. It includes a set of C++ class libraries providing services for 3D surface and solid modeling, visualization, data exchange and rapid application development.

Below is a short summary of instructions on how to compile and install OpenCASCADE community edition by hand (for the case you wish to do so).

How to compile and install OpenCASCADE

Get a clone of the OCE repository:

git clone git://github.com/tpaviot/oce.git

It is a good practice to build in a separate directory:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -D OCE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/path/to/where/you/want/oce \
      -D OCE_TESTING=OFF \
      -D OCE_VISUALISATION=OFF \
      -D OCE_DISABLE_X11=ON \
      ..
make install

This will turn off some packages we don't need. The default package options also work, though.

Interfacing deal.II to OpenCASCADE

Support for OpenCASCADE will be enabled automatically if a system wide installation of OpenCASCADE can be found. To use a self compiled version, specify


    -DOPENCASCADE_DIR=/path/to/opencascade/or/oce

when invoking cmake. Alternatively, you can also set an environment variable OPENCASCADE_DIR (valid alternatives are also OCC_DIR and OCE_DIR) and cmake will pick up this path.

You can override the autodetection by manually setting


    -DDEAL_II_WITH_OPENCASCADE=OFF|ON