Hi Richard and Welcome! On Apr 20, 2014, at 4:13 PM, Richard Gillham Darnley wrote:
> I would like to introduce myself. I am a 'mature' newbie programmer who > would like to produce a conversion routine between BRL-CAD's native file > format to what is called Geometry Description Markup Language (GDML). That sounds like a fantastic objective, doable, useful. An importer would be a bit more complicated, but an exporter should be fairly easy. CERN's geometry format is exceptionally compatible with ours with most of our constructs translating one-for-one into GDML (which is a simple text-based, xml-based format). > As I am still learning to program in C I see this project taking me some > time, but any advice from the other developers would be much appreciated as > to the steps to take or other smaller goals to achieve first. You might want to start by reading the src/conv/g-xxx.c template converter which stubs out the shell of a converter that you can expand upon, get ideas, or at least try to understand what that code is doing. Since most of our geometry constructs do translate directly to GDML format (and that's exceptionally rare), there's not really a great example to follow. The simple g-dot exporter (Graphviz file format) is probably the closest as it just prints text data. I suggest starting really small, a simple main() that creates a valid empty GDML file. Then add some command line options, make the output file name match the input file name, etc ... some of the things that are going on in src/conv/g-xxx.c, then make it output just one primitive, and so on. Of course, ask questions for help too. ;) Cheers! Sean ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Start Your Social Network Today - Download eXo Platform Build your Enterprise Intranet with eXo Platform Software Java Based Open Source Intranet - Social, Extensible, Cloud Ready Get Started Now And Turn Your Intranet Into A Collaboration Platform http://p.sf.net/sfu/ExoPlatform _______________________________________________ BRL-CAD Developer mailing list brlcad-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/brlcad-devel
