BRL-CAD Release 7.24.0, Archer Alpha

Sean Morrison — Wed, 10 Jul 2013 04:02:13 -0000

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 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 devs@brlcad.org

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

Google Code-In

Sean Morrison — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 05:34:56 -0000

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 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

BRL-CAD Release 7.22.0

Sean Morrison — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 00:26:51 -0000

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 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

Open Shading Language

Sean Morrison — Fri, 25 May 2012 19:46:54 -0000

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 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

Introducing our 2012 GSoC Students

Sean Morrison — Tue, 22 May 2012 21:41:43 -0000

For BRL-CAD's fourth year participating in the Google Summer of Code [1], we expanded our involvement and accepted a record 11 students. Predominantly evaluated on the student's ability to develop, communicate, and interact, their proposals were selected from among more than 50 received as exceptional candidate developers for BRL-CAD. A categorized summary of this year's projects [2] is as follows:

Code refactoring & cleanup
• Ksenija Slivko: source code reduction
• Anoop Malav: image processing infrastructure
• Andrei Popescu: networking library infrastructure

Hybrid modeling support
• Anurag Murty: voxelize geometry
• Laijiren: tessellate NURBS (to polygonal mesh)
• Chris Dueck: volume and centroid extensions
• Wu Jianbang: Dual-representation (Implicit & NURBS) objects

Interface development
• Mesut Oezdogan: portable GUI infrastructure
• Suryajith Chillara: BRL-CAD Benchmark website
• Cristina Precup: visualizing construction hierarchies
• Alex Taylor: physical simulation infrastructure

Our GSoC 2012 page [2] has additional details on the students, development logs for tracking their individual progress, and their summary project pages. See our website announcement [3] for more details.

[1] http://brlcad.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code
[2] http://brlcad.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code/2012
[3] http://brlcad.org/d/node/98

GSoC 2012 Proposal Submissions

Sean Morrison — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 17:05:39 -0000

Once again participating in the Google Summer of Code [1], students interested in working on BRL-CAD this summer have been diligently preparing and posting proposals over the past couple weeks. In all, we ended up with about 50 submissions by the deadline with about three dozen or so being considered valid proposals that will go through our review process.

This year, code cleanup seems to be the most popular theme along with a wide range of interest in NURBS, object mathematics, website services, and more. The overall quality seems to be fantastic this year with many students electing to showcase their proposal on the BRL-CAD Wiki with diagrams, prototypes, and patches demonstrating concepts and abilities. Awesome.

On another positive note, students have at LEAST a 5% chance of being accepted simply by applying to BRL-CAD, which is far greater than one has applying to some other open source organizations. Depending on how our proposal reviews and slot allocations proceed, we hope to increase those odds easily into the 15-30% range or better.

Until selections are finalized, our mentors will continue to work with students on their patches [2] and will be posing comments, questions, and holding interviews over the next two weeks. A big thanks goes out to all of our student applicants! It'll be very hard to narrow down on just a few students to work with this summer but we hope all are inspired to contribute to open source source software and thank everyone for their interest in BRL-CAD!

[1] http://brlcad.org/d/node/97
[2] https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=105292&atid=640804

BRL-CAD and the 2012 Google Summer of Code

Sean Morrison — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 03:35:47 -0000

The BRL-CAD open source community is once again delighted to be participating as a mentoring organization in the 2012 Google Summer of Code (GSoC)! We will be helping students develop their project proposals through the April 6th application deadline. Any students interested in joining the BRL-CAD development team this summer can get started here:

http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org/google/gsoc2012/brlcad

Now in it's sixth year and BRL-CAD's fourth year participating, GSoC is an annual summer program sponsored by Google where they pay students a stipend of 5000 USD to work on open source. It's a highly competitive program both for students and for the mentoring organizations. As chances of having a BRL-CAD proposal accepted are much higher from impassioned and interactive individuals, applicants should join our developer mailing list or IRC channel and introduce themselves today! We eagerly look forward to working with new developers on their projects as we share details on their progress throughout the year.

This year, we've made it really easy for new developers to get started with BRL-CAD. As a large codebase with more than a million lines of code, figuring out where to begin can be daunting or intimidating. Developer Tom Browder has prepared an awesome virtual machine disk image with everything preconfigured, installed, and ready to go. It includes a source checkout, documentation, code examples, and more to help new developers get started quickly:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/brlcad/files/BRL-CAD%20for%20Virtual%20Machines/

One of the primary goals of the program is to introduce students to free open source software development with the specific intent of attracting those students as new long-term developers for that project. For BRL-CAD, this is the primary reason for participating. With increased awareness, new developers, and increased developer activity, we hope to accelerate BRL-CAD development to benefit the entire open source CAD community.

---
http://brlcad.org/d/node/97
http://code.google.com/soc/

Coverity Case Study: BRL-CAD Development Testing

Sean Morrison — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 23:25:37 -0000

A little over a month ago at a week-long coffee-infused hack-a-thon in-person gathering, many of our core developers worked on improving BRL-CAD's source code. The team inspected and fixed more than fifteen hundred issues being reported by Coverity Static Analysis*. Just released, the 2011 Coverity Open Source Integrity Report [1] includes a two-page case study detailing our efforts. The free report is available (registration req'd) through the Open Scan Initiative website:

http://scan.coverity.com

After five days of code crunching, the developers reduced BRL-CAD's defect density to less than 1/4th the industry average at approximately 0.22 defects per thousand lines of code (kloc). Since then, the rate continues to be reduced as the devs work on addressing 100% of the issues being reported as part of ongoing code cleanup and other code hardening efforts [2].

More details about the Coverity annual report are provided on their blog [3] and in their press release [4]. The report includes a comparison of commercial software to open source with rather interesting results (spoiler: open source wins).

[1] http://softwareintegrity.coverity.com/coverity-scan-2011-open-source-integrity-report-registration.html
[2] http://brlcad.org/wiki/Code_Cleanup
[3] http://blog.coverity.com/uncategorized/coverity-releases-the-coverity-scan-2011-open-source-integrity-report/
[4] http://coverity.com/html/press/open-source-code-quality-on-par-with-proprietary-code-in-2011-coverity-scan-report.html

* Coverity Static Analysis is one of the best static source code analysis tools available in the industry with a false-positive rate less than 10%. While normally and substantially paid-for software, Coverity provides cost-free scanning and consultative assistance to open source projects as part of the Open Scan Initiative. The Open Scan Initiative was initiated in 2006 by the Department of Homeland Security and continues as infrastructure owned and operated by Coverity.

Updated BRL-CAD export plugin for Pro/E

Sean Morrison — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 18:58:49 -0000

A new version of BRL-CAD's geometry converter plugin for Pro/ENGINEER is now available for download [1]. The ProE-BRL plugin is a production exporter that has been developed over the years as a means of importing geometry into BRL-CAD from Pro/ENGINEER. This update of the plugin for the Windows platform supports Wildfire 4 (64-bit), Wildfire 5 (64-bit), and Creo (32-bit and 64-bit). The plugin will work on other platforms, but will have to be compiled from a source distribution. This binary release is once again being provided with the hopes that it will be useful and should fix problems loading the plugin on Vista.

The way the converter works, it asks Pro/ENGINEER to convert geometry from their internal boundary representation format into a facetized polygonal format, which is then imported into BRL-CAD as a collection of Bag o' Triangles (BoT) geometry. Needless to say, that process can (and does) fail within Pro/E before even getting to BRL-CAD, so the ProE-BRL plugin attempts to coerce a conversion. It iteratively adjusts tolerances (down to specified minimums) until geometry is processed successfully and provides various options for reporting when conversion to polygonal mesh fails. While that method of import is rather suboptimal [2], it's often a convenient method of importing models into BRL-CAD if you work extensively with Pro/ENGINEER.

[1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/brlcad/files/BRL-CAD%20External%20Plugins/
[2] See our new "step-g" STEP importer for a better way.

Advanced Joint Effectiveness Model (AJEM)

Sean Morrison — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 18:19:09 -0000

The Advanced Joint Effectiveness Model (AJEM) [1] development team recently announced the availability of a new AJEM release. As BRL-CAD is incorporated as an integral part of AJEM, a brief overview is provided.

AJEM is a lethality, vulnerability, and endgame computer simulation code capable of analyzing various types of threats against aircraft and ground targets. It combines elements of threat modeling, target modeling, encounter kinematics, generation of weapon burst points, propagation of damage (penetration, fire, blast, etc.), evaluating system relationships (functionality, redundancies, etc.), and evaluating remaining capability or loss of function. Supported by JTCG/ME [2], JASPO [3], and others, AJEM is the U.S. Department of Defense standard computer simulation suite for performing verified and validated trauma, survivability, lethality, vulnerability, and signature prediction analyses.

BRL-CAD is bundled into the AJEM suite and called upon by various analysis and simulation codes in order to provide a robust geometric representation, fast geometric interrogation, and highly-detailed geometry evaluation. By using BRL-CAD, the analysis codes have absolutely no license costs, recurring or otherwise, and completely uninhibited use [4]. Moreover, analysis developers gain protection against CAD industry corporate restructuring, capitalize on decades of (prior and ongoing) development activity, have unlimited extensibility potential, and do not have to rely upon any particular commercial vendor's product vitality or development priorities. It's a big win and savings all around.

A separation of responsibilities allows simulation and analysis developers to focus on their needs knowing that BRL-CAD's solid geometry engine is managing data efficiently and correctly. It's thanks to efforts like AJEM, their developers, and their sponsors that BRL-CAD can concentrate development on providing robust high-performance geometry services. While AJEM distribution is limited to authorized recipients due to the nature of the analysis codes involved, their development and integration methodology is a testament to efficient reuse, on-going development recapitalization, and collaboration. See the AJEM site for more details.

[1] http://ajem.com
[2] Joint Technical Coordinating Group for Munitions Effectiveness
[3] Joint Aircraft Survivability Program Office
[4] BRL-CAD is free open source software!

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