Can anyone recommend a good set of CGAL tutorials for beginners? I have tried to read the documentation but it seems very dense to me even as a moderately experienced C++ programmer. Therefore I'm trying to learn by solving simple problems but even that has been confusing. For example, the problem I am specifically trying to solve right now is the following: From a 3D point cloud, find the convex hull, then loop over the finite facets of the convex hull and print each facet's vertices. It seems like there should be a straightforward way to do this; I would have expected that 3D polyhedra would own a vector of facet objects, each of which in turn would own a vector of its edges, each of which in turn would own a vector of its vertices, and that their would be some access through this hierarchy using iterators. But so far I have been unable to find a simple way to navigate through this hierarchy (if it exists).
You can start with this tutorial http://cel.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/34/04/48/PDF/whole-course.pdf
Take a look also at these videos http://www.cgal.org/videos.html
For your specific problem take a look at http://www.cgal.org/Manual/latest/doc_html/cgal_manual/Convex_hull_3/Chapter_main.html http://www.cgal.org/Tutorials/Polyhedron/