Start here

Welcome to BeforeTheMesh

The educational foundation of our ecosystem, teaching the principles behind TheMeshProject and btm‑framework.

before the mesh

What you will learn

  • Clean, scalable C++ project architecture.
  • Modern, target‑based CMake workflows.
  • Rendering engine fundamentals and application layers.
  • Math foundations, mesh loading, and visualization pipelines.

Who this is for

BeforeTheMesh is designed for intermediate developers who already know basic C++ and want to understand how real rendering engines and tools are structured.

What you will build

You will gradually construct:

  • A rendering window and modular application layer.
  • A math module and rendering pipeline.
  • A mesh loader and real‑time visualization tool.

How the tutorials work

Each tutorial:

  • Introduces a concept and the engineering reasoning behind it.
  • Provides clean, modern C++ code integrated with btm‑framework.
  • Ends with a working result—no hidden magic.

Your first step

Start with Step 1: Setting Up Your Environment, where we present the initial setup. You will install the tools, build the framework and the examples, and run our first applications to verify that everything is working correctly.