The numerical simulation of phenomena requires a good quality discretization
(mesh) of the domain. Depending on the problem to be simulated, the mesh has to
fulfil different quality criteria. Because of geometry restrictions or point
density requirements, several mesh elements might not satisfy the required
quality criteria and sometimes it is also not required that all elements fulfil
them. Then, it would be helpful to know where unwanted elements are located in
order to see if they need to be repaired or not. That is why a visualization
tool that allows the user to inspect a mesh before a simulation is performed
can be useful to prevent simulation problems. Moreover, if data from
simulations is available, the visualization of geometrical properties together
with simulation data could be also helpful to understand not expected results.
These challenges have motivated us to develop Camar´on, a visualization tool
for large surface and volume meshes described in this paper. The surface meshes
can be composed any polygonal cell and the 3D meshes can include any convex
polyhedral cell. This tool was implemented in C++ and the OpenGL Shading
Language (GLSL). We discuss the design and implementation issues that make our
software portable, extensible and different from other visualization tools. We
also compare the performance between Camarón and GeomView, TetView and MeshLab.