On Mar 14, 2014, at 8:42 PM, Andrew Wells <andrewm...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all, I'm Andrew Wells and I'm interested in working on BRL-CAD via > Google Summer of Code. The proposal that sounds most interesting to me > is the NURBS Boolean one. Hi Andrew, thanks for the intro! You certainly identified a complicated topic, but not insurmountable. What interests you about it? Other ideas of similar complexity are NURBS editing support, plate-mode NURBS, and NURBS optimization. > I will be honest and admit that I haven't > done any programming projects in topics like this before. However, I > have a strong background in mathematics and programming (especially > optimization) which are all that are listed under project > qualifications. It’s good to be honest about your familiarity and experience when tackling a complex topic. The question I’d have is whether 1) you understand the objectives of this particular problem domain and 2) you are adept at reading and improving complicated code. I suggest you give it a try this weekend. Perhaps try to find some Boolean evaluation that currently fails and try to fix it. > Would you be able to provide some more information on > what sort of background I need for this project so I can clearly tell if > I am not qualified? That’s really hard to say with something this complex. You could be really strong at coding logic and terrible at math or really poor at coding but phenomenal at math. You’d probably do fine with either strength. If you’re somewhere in-between, it’ll probably be more a question of how well you can follow existing code. It’ll be easier to determine suitability if you provide details about your coding background. If you have any experience doing performance profiling, that would be where I’d suggest you focus a proposal since that could also lead into Boolean work. I suggest spending no more than a few hours — identify some current limitation or bug (I believe we have some NURBS unit tests that currently fail) and try to fix it. Or maybe try to make meed’s “facetize -t” command use our new NURBS instead of our old bspline NURBS. Or easier still, convert our “teapot” utility (which creates a utah teapot model). Any of those tasks will give you a good idea where your background is in relation to the task at hand. Cheers! Sean ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Learn Graph Databases - Download FREE O'Reilly Book "Graph Databases" is the definitive new guide to graph databases and their applications. Written by three acclaimed leaders in the field, this first edition is now available. Download your free book today! http://p.sf.net/sfu/13534_NeoTech _______________________________________________ BRL-CAD Developer mailing list brlcad-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/brlcad-devel
