On Aug 5, 2014, at 6:56 AM, Djimeli Konrad wrote: > Hello > > My name is Djimeli Konrad and i am interested in contributing to > the open source through brlcad. I am primarily a c/c++ programmer from Africa > and would like to work on any of the brlcad geometry converters. Presently i > am doing some research on how import and export work but i can not really > decide on weather to improve any of the existing converter or create a new > one among those on the ideas page, since i do not fully understand the > concept and also my limitation. I would be glad to get any pointer that would > help facilitate my understanding of this aspect and i am willing to dedicate > the rest of my summer holiday to learn more about brlcad and especially file > import and export as it seem to be something very interesting to work on.
Hi Konrad and welcome! Glad to hear about your interests. Working on converters is actually a high priority for us right now because we're creating a new geometry conversion library that can be embedded into applications external to BRL-CAD. This requires improving our existing converters and implementing new ones. To get started, I would recommend first extending / improving one of our existing converters. It's harder to read code than to write code, but that will give a much better understanding of how our converters work. It will also better prepare you for writing a new converter, should you attempt that as well. A simple task to begin with would be to make any existing converter convert all top-level objects by default. Currently, you specify which file (e.g., myfile.g) and which object(s) to convert (e.g., object1 and object2), so when you run something like g-stl, the usage looks like this: Usage: g-stl [-bvi8] [-xX lvl] [-P num_cpus] [-a abs_tess_tol] [-r rel_tess_tol] [-n norm_tess_tol] [-D dist_calc_tol] [-o output_file_name.stl | -m directory_name] brlcad_db.g object(s) And a typical use would be: g-stl -o myfile.stl myfile.g object1 object2 You could make it work so that you don't have to specify any objects: g-stl -o myfile.stl myfile.g This would convert all top-level object(s). To make that work, you'll probably want to use the db_ls() function (e.g., something like db_ls(dbip, DB_LS_TOPS, &paths); will get a list of objects). The converters are in the src/conv directory. You can see db_ls in use in the src/libged directory. Cheers! Sean ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Infragistics Professional Build stunning WinForms apps today! Reboot your WinForms applications with our WinForms controls. Build a bridge from your legacy apps to the future. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=153845071&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ BRL-CAD Developer mailing list brlcad-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/brlcad-devel
