BRL-CAD

After nearly an entire year's worth of intense collaborative effort, the 7.24.0 major release of BRL-CAD is now available for download. More information including detailed itemization of changes is available at: http://brlcad.org/d/node/186 This is ... [More] the alpha release unveiling of Archer/MGED, a preliminary interface update to BRL-CAD's graphical geometry editor. Some highlights include an integrated graphical tree view, a single window framework, drag and drop geometry editing, information panels, shortcut buttons, improved polygonal mesh and 2D sketch editing, level of detail wireframes, NURBS shaded display support, and much more. As alpha software, this new MGED prototype aims to provide functional feature parity with the antecedent MGED interface while introducing changes. Prior to upcoming beta testing where the emphasis is predominantly on stability and usability, this alpha status solicits feedback from the community on capability and features. Feedback may be provided by writing to [email protected] This release also includes various improvements to BRL-CAD's ray tracing infrastructure including CPU thread affinity locking for faster performance, more consistent grazing hit behavior, expanded volume and surface area calculations, numerous bug fixes, and more robust NURBS evaluation. Thank you to all that have contributed towards this release including Aaron Keesing, Akshay Kashyap, Andrei Popescu, Daniel Roßberg, Tom Browder, Carl Moore, Cliff Yapp, Jordi Sayol, Chris Dueck, Keith Bowman, Nick Reed, Bob Parker, Richard Weiss, and Sean Morrison. Special thanks to GSoC student Kesha Shah for her efforts helping prepare release notes as well. This is a backwards-compatible release with binaries provided for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Please visit the BRL-CAD website to download the latest version: http://brlcad.org/d/download [Less]

After nearly an entire year's worth of intense collaborative effort, the 7.24.0 major release of BRL-CAD is now available for download. More information including detailed itemization of changes is available at: http://brlcad.org/d/node/186 This ... [More] is the alpha release unveiling of Archer/MGED, a preliminary interface update to BRL-CAD's graphical geometry editor. Some highlights include an integrated graphical tree view, a single window framework, drag and drop geometry editing, information panels, shortcut buttons, improved polygonal mesh and 2D sketch editing, level of detail wireframes, NURBS shaded display support, and much more. As alpha software, this new MGED prototype aims to provide functional feature parity with the antecedent MGED interface while introducing changes. Prior to upcoming beta testing where the emphasis is predominantly on stability and usability, this alpha status solicits feedback from the community on capability and features. Feedback may be provided by writing to [email protected] This release also includes various improvements to BRL-CAD's ray tracing infrastructure including CPU thread affinity locking for faster performance, more consistent grazing hit behavior, expanded volume and surface area calculations, numerous bug fixes, and more robust NURBS evaluation. Thank you to all that have contributed towards this release including Aaron Keesing, Akshay Kashyap, Andrei Popescu, Daniel Roßberg, Tom Browder, Carl Moore, Cliff Yapp, Jordi Sayol, Chris Dueck, Keith Bowman, Nick Reed, Bob Parker, Richard Weiss, and Sean Morrison. Special thanks to GSoC student Kesha Shah for her efforts helping prepare release notes as well. This is a backwards-compatible release with binaries provided for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Please visit the BRL-CAD website to download the latest version: http://brlcad.org/d/download [Less]

Out of only 10 chosen, I'm delighted to announce that BRL-CAD was accepted to participate in Google Code-In (GCI)! http://brlcad.org/d/node/101 Complementary to the highly successful Google Summer of Code program for university students, GCI is a ... [More] contest encouraging pre-university students (age 13-17) to get involved with open source. Students will work our "itty-bitty" tasks related to code, documentation/training, outreach/research, quality assurance, and user interface. The BRL-CAD open source community is honored to be selected for GCI. With no shortage of introductory tasks helping improve the state of open source CAD, students may begin making submissions on November 26, 2012: http://www.google-melange.com/gci/homepage/google/gci2012 For a detailed timeline of important events and more information please review the Frequently Asked Questions [0]. For an introduction and itemization of all organizations participating in GCI, see the Google Open Source Blog [1] and watch their screencast [2]. [0] http://www.google-melange.com/gci/document/show/gci_program/google/gci2012/help_page [1] http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2012/11/mentoring-organizations-for-google-code.html [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW5yNIDPZeY [Less]

Out of only 10 chosen, I'm delighted to announce that BRL-CAD was accepted to participate in Google Code-In (GCI)! http://brlcad.org/d/node/101 Complementary to the highly successful Google Summer of Code program for university students, GCI is a ... [More] contest encouraging pre-university students (age 13-17) to get involved with open source. Students will work our "itty-bitty" tasks related to code, documentation/training, outreach/research, quality assurance, and user interface. The BRL-CAD open source community is honored to be selected for GCI. With no shortage of introductory tasks helping improve the state of open source CAD, students may begin making submissions on November 26, 2012: http://www.google-melange.com/gci/homepage/google/gci2012 For a detailed timeline of important events and more information please review the Frequently Asked Questions [0]. For an introduction and itemization of all organizations participating in GCI, see the Google Open Source Blog [1] and watch their screencast [2]. [0] http://www.google-melange.com/gci/document/show/gci_program/google/gci2012/help_page [1] http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2012/11/mentoring-organizations-for-google-code.html [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW5yNIDPZeY [Less]

Out of only 10 chosen, I'm delighted to announce that BRL-CAD was accepted to participate in Google Code-In (GCI)!http://brlcad.org/d/node/101

After more than six months development, BRL-CAD 7.22.0 is now available! This is a substantial introduction of a new development line encompassing more changes than any prior version since BRL-CAD's release as free open source software. We have ... [More] robust solid NURBS ray tracing, fixed everything reported by Coverity, updated several geometry converters, worked on a new physics simulation system, made several improvements to BRL-CAD's extensive documentation resources, and provide a vastly improved installer for Mac OS X. In all, seventeen contributors helped deliver about one hundred distinct user-visible changes for this release of BRL-CAD. See a comprehensive itemization of changes at https://sourceforge.net/projects/brlcad/files/BRL-CAD%20Source/7.22.0/ This release includes hundreds of fixes for source code defects, logic and memory management bugs, potential security vulnerabilities, and numerous other issues reported by Coverity Static Analysis. Having participated in the Coverity Scan Initiative since inception in 2006, this release marks a major completion milestone. For more than 2100 issues reported, every issue was inspected, code modifications were reviewed, critical features were tested, user-visible changes were documented, and now all reported issues are resolved. Development of BREP/NURBS representation support within BRL-CAD is now mature with the completion of a thorough review for modeling and analysis suitability. The successful validation and verification review compared objects in implicit, polygonal mesh, and NURBS forms across more than a dozen tests examining rendering results, presented areas, volume, and other properties. This release provides ray tracing, wireframe, and performance improvements. Progress continues to be made implementing conversion of traditional geometry to NURBS format. This release introduces numerous major feature developments including the initial implementation of a new physics simulation capability, a new ambient occlusion rendering mode, and the integration of rtwizard into Archer. The simulation system, developed under the European Space Agency's 2011 and 2012 Summer of Code in Space (SOCIS) program, allows geometry to dynamically interact with each other (e.g., collision detection, friction) or their environment (e.g., gravity). Ambient occlusion is a shading method that helps add considerable realism and feature definition to renderings, enabled within rt using the "set ambSamples=128" option. The rtwizard rendering interface was extended to work as a command-line tool (useful for scripting) and is integrated within Archer as a rendering interface. Among more than 40 user-visible bugs fixed is a significant database corruption issue on 64-bit big endian platforms (e.g., IBM Power Series supercomputers) when writing out ebm, dsp, vol, and hf primitives. Along with fixing the corruption, the STEP importer receives several updates including support for importing assembly hierarchies and is in the process of being tested on Windows. Conversion support continues to be a development priority with several enhancements included for the OBJ, COMGEOM, FASTGEN, and RAW geometry importers. BRL-CAD's documentation has been extended, improved, and translated due to the sustained efforts of numerous contributors. Manual page documentation is made available on Windows through the 'brlman' command and within MGED's built-in help interface. Many other utilities and commands receive documentation updates, corrections, and other improvements. The introductory "About BRL-CAD" article is now available in Russian, Italian, and Armenian. Many extended thanks to the voluminous hands that contributed to this release including Abhijit Nandy, Carl Moore, Christopher Pitts, Ilya, Karen Mgebrova, Lee Butler, Mike Tegtmeyer, Daniel Roßberg, Wu Jianbang, Keith Bowman, Erik Greenwald, Bob Parker, Richard Weiss, Tom Browder, Sean Morrison, Nick Reed, and Cliff Yapp. This is a backwards-comparible source AND binary release. After several years inactivity, this update of BRL-CAD for Mac OS X is provided as a fully self-contained drag-n-drop application bundle. Updated binaries are available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. Please visit the Sourceforge project website to download the latest version: http://sf.net/projects/brlcad [Less]

After more than six months development, BRL-CAD 7.22.0 is now available! This is a substantial introduction of a new development line encompassing more changes than any prior version since BRL-CAD's release as free open source software. We have ... [More] robust solid NURBS ray tracing, fixed everything reported by Coverity, updated several geometry converters, worked on a new physics simulation system, made several improvements to BRL-CAD's extensive documentation resources, and provide a vastly improved installer for Mac OS X. In all, seventeen contributors helped deliver about one hundred distinct user-visible changes for this release of BRL-CAD. [Less]

After more than six months development, BRL-CAD 7.22.0 is now available! This is a substantial introduction of a new development line encompassing more changes than any prior version since BRL-CAD's release as free open source software. We have ... [More] robust solid NURBS ray tracing, fixed everything reported by Coverity, updated several geometry converters, worked on a new physics simulation system, made several improvements to BRL-CAD's extensive documentation resources, and provide a vastly improved installer for Mac OS X. In all, seventeen contributors helped deliver about one hundred distinct user-visible changes for this release of BRL-CAD. See a comprehensive itemization of changes at https://sourceforge.net/projects/brlcad/files/BRL-CAD%20Source/7.22.0/ This release includes hundreds of fixes for source code defects, logic and memory management bugs, potential security vulnerabilities, and numerous other issues reported by Coverity Static Analysis. Having participated in the Coverity Scan Initiative since inception in 2006, this release marks a major completion milestone. For more than 2100 issues reported, every issue was inspected, code modifications were reviewed, critical features were tested, user-visible changes were documented, and now all reported issues are resolved. Development of BREP/NURBS representation support within BRL-CAD is now mature with the completion of a thorough review for modeling and analysis suitability. The successful validation and verification review compared objects in implicit, polygonal mesh, and NURBS forms across more than a dozen tests examining rendering results, presented areas, volume, and other properties. This release provides ray tracing, wireframe, and performance improvements. Progress continues to be made implementing conversion of traditional geometry to NURBS format. This release introduces numerous major feature developments including the initial implementation of a new physics simulation capability, a new ambient occlusion rendering mode, and the integration of rtwizard into Archer. The simulation system, developed under the European Space Agency's 2011 and 2012 Summer of Code in Space (SOCIS) program, allows geometry to dynamically interact with each other (e.g., collision detection, friction) or their environment (e.g., gravity). Ambient occlusion is a shading method that helps add considerable realism and feature definition to renderings, enabled within rt using the "set ambSamples=128" option. The rtwizard rendering interface was extended to work as a command-line tool (useful for scripting) and is integrated within Archer as a rendering interface. Among more than 40 user-visible bugs fixed is a significant database corruption issue on 64-bit big endian platforms (e.g., IBM Power Series supercomputers) when writing out ebm, dsp, vol, and hf primitives. Along with fixing the corruption, the STEP importer receives several updates including support for importing assembly hierarchies and is in the process of being tested on Windows. Conversion support continues to be a development priority with several enhancements included for the OBJ, COMGEOM, FASTGEN, and RAW geometry importers. BRL-CAD's documentation has been extended, improved, and translated due to the sustained efforts of numerous contributors. Manual page documentation is made available on Windows through the 'brlman' command and within MGED's built-in help interface. Many other utilities and commands receive documentation updates, corrections, and other improvements. The introductory "About BRL-CAD" article is now available in Russian, Italian, and Armenian. Many extended thanks to the voluminous hands that contributed to this release including Abhijit Nandy, Carl Moore, Christopher Pitts, Ilya, Karen Mgebrova, Lee Butler, Mike Tegtmeyer, Daniel Roßberg, Wu Jianbang, Keith Bowman, Erik Greenwald, Bob Parker, Richard Weiss, Tom Browder, Sean Morrison, Nick Reed, and Cliff Yapp. This is a backwards-comparible source AND binary release. After several years inactivity, this update of BRL-CAD for Mac OS X is provided as a fully self-contained drag-n-drop application bundle. Updated binaries are available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. Please visit the Sourceforge project website to download the latest version: http://sf.net/projects/brlcad [Less]

The forwarded announcement below describes an achievement for one of our optional dependencies, the Open Shading Language (OSL) from Sony Pictures Imageworks. OSL is basically an open source shader system that helps rendering tools make better ... [More] pictures. Kudos to their developers -- it's quite an impressive achievement to have an entire film shaded with just OSL. [Less]

The forwarded announcement below describes an achievement for one of our optional dependencies, the Open Shading Language (OSL) from Sony Pictures Imageworks. OSL is basically an open source shader system that helps rendering tools make better ... [More] pictures. Kudos to their developers -- it's quite an impressive achievement to have an entire film shaded with just OSL. A former GSoC participant, developer Guilherme Kunigami, worked on an initial integration of OSL into BRL-CAD's rendering pipeline just last year. It's fun to see a direct industry relation to our development projects, why we work on the things we do, and how they relate to the "bigger picture". We'd obviously need more work to provide some of the production shaders and lighting used by the likes of MIB3 or The Amazing Spider-Man, but Kunigami's results were impressive enough after just a couple months development. As our OSL integration efforts continue (developer needed), it'll become even easier to generate realistic renderings with BRL-CAD. So the next time you're at the movies, know that quality may be coming soon to a BRL-CAD near you. ;-) See http://brlcad.org/d/node/99 for more details. Begin forwarded message: From: Larry Gritz Date: May 25, 2012 12:52:16 PM EDT Subject: [osl-dev] Big day for OSL "Men in Black 3" -- the first 100% all-OSL show that we completed -- opens in theaters today (at least in the US & Canada; I guess it opened elsewhere in the past couple days). And it went off without a hitch, at least as far as shading was concerned, as did "The Amazing Spider-Man", which recently wrapped for us and will be released in July. These shows were as complex (visually, geometrically, and lighting-wise) as anything we've ever done. On deck: Hotel Transylvania (September), Oz the Great and Powerful (March). So for everybody who was waiting for a big project to be completed with OSL before trusting it in production... that ship has sailed, and then some. -- Larry Gritz [Less]