Lithics3D provides a toolbox for working with 3D scans of archaeological lithics within the R environment. The functions included herein are designed to work with clean triangular meshes and existing landmarks. For the time being at least mesh generation, pre-processing (e.g. cleaning), and landmarking must be done with different tools. The provided functions can be divided into two categories:
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High-level functions for (semi-)automatic segmentation and analysis of meshes qua archaeological artifacts (e.g. utilities for automatically measuring edge angles, mapping artifact thickness, etcetera).
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Low-level functions for working with meshes as geometric objects. These functions are meant to provide the building blocks required to implement more complex functionality.
Lithics3D currently incorporates functions written over a period of several years, and some of these functions are far more experimental than others. For now, please be mindful of the fact that this is very much a work in progress, and test your results or contact me for help or clarification.
If you haven't done so already, install devtools in R:
install.packages("devtools")
Once devtools is available you can install Lithics3D from github with the following R commands:
require(devtools)
install_github("cornelmpop/Lithics3D", dependencies=T, build_vignettes=T)
For basic information about the package, including a list of available functions and data, please load the package and consult the manual:
library(Lithics3D)
?Lithics3D
Please also check the wiki at: https://github.com/cornelmpop/Lithics3D/wiki, and feel free to explore the available vignettes (a work in progress!). For example:
vignette("Lithics3D")