So a couple weeks ago I promised a list of our top-priorities and then disaster
struck at home that prevented me from uploading the details to our wiki. As
most everyone interested in working with BRL-CAD have joined this list, I’ll
just spell out a summary of those areas here. Note that these are high-level
categories with many possible GSoC projects in each — they are not project
ideas themselves. Your proposal should be considerably more narrow in scope
and specific.
They’re not in any particular order and your proposal does not have to fall
under one of these categories to get accepted. They are just areas that are
receiving a lot of attention and/or have a lot of potential for benefitting
BRL-CAD (or one or our associated projects: LinuxCNC, LibreCAD, OpenSCAD, and
STEPcode).
Geometry Conversion — anything and everything related to geometry conversion is
a priority right now including new file formats, refactoring/improving old
formats, robust representation format translations (e.g., nurbs, volumetric,
polygonal, csg, etc), conversion testing, and more.
ISO 10303 STEP Support — obviously also related to geometry conversion, import
and export, but also encompasses updates and improvements to the STEPcode
parser we rely on.
NURBS Boundary Representation — we’re moving towards a hybrid modeling and
representation approach, similar to other commercial CAD systems, and work is
needed on visualization, editing, import, export, performance, validation, and
evaluation. Improving NURBS prep is the current priority, bou really need to
have prior experience working with NURBS or just outstanding math and/or
programming skills to accomplish anything useful in the GSoC timeframe.
Web Infrastructure — lots of exciting work going on here with OGV, Benchmark,
Materials Database, our documentation, and a recent need for a web application
that will kick off testing ranges of commits given particular data and testing
criteria.
Ray tracing — improve performance with coherent packets, SIMD, GPGPU, OpenCL,
etc. Improve our LIBRT ray tracing library. Improve our ray tracing tools
(rt, rtedge, gqa, …). Accelerate performance. Verify and validate behavior.
Engineering Drawings — broad category encompassing blueprint-style annotations,
labels, leaders, notes, rtedge-style (streaming) hidden line and contour
rendering, geometry projection, etc., following ASME Y14.100 where it makes
sense. LibreCAD collaboration possibilities here too.
CNC and 3D Printing — Gcode import/export, slicing, tool path evaluation,
interface usability, interfacing with equipment, new GUI work. LinuxCNC or
OpenSCAD collaboration / enhancement / integration.
And last but not least...
Usability — so much going on here with Archer and Qt development work, display
manager and framebuffer portability, mesh and/or nurbs editing, interactive
simulation, command consolidation / cleanup, and documentation infrastructure.
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