A developer version of BRL-CAD's geometry converter plugin for Pro/ENGINEER is now available. The ProE-BRL plugin is a production exporter that has been developed over the years as a means to import geometry into BRL-CAD from Pro/ENGINEER (aka Pro/E).

As scriptable geometry is a topic that often comes up from power users looking to get the most out of BRL-CAD's modeling capabilities, user Bryan Bishop wrote a script in Perl to create geometry via MGED. Bryan shows in his script how to procedurally generate a spiraling pattern of hollowed-out boxes.

After a couple months of concerted stabilization effort, I'm happy to announce the availability of BRL-CAD 7.16.8. This is our largest patch release ever, with more than 50 bug fixes, minor enhancements, and other user-visible changes to BRL-CAD.

BRL-CAD's ray tracing support for NURBS boundary representation geometry objects continues to be developed towards providing a robust foundation for supporting multiple-representation geometry. This release includes several NURBS ray tracing bug fixes, robustness improvements, and trimming enhancements.

After two consecutive and successful years of participation, BRL-CAD will not be applying to take part in the 2010 Google Summer of Code (GSoC). While we still openly and eagerly welcome new contributors to BRL-CAD, we remain mindful of the major commitment that GSoC participation requires. As development continues to progress rapidly on the development and initial release of a new graphical user interface for BRL-CAD geometry editing, our priorities need to remain focused this year on the complex integration tasks ahead of us.

I'm very delighted to be able to announce that after more than five years of on-going effort by more than 25 people, BRL-CAD is now available on Gentoo's main portage tree. Gentoo Linux users should be able to simply "emerge brlcad" and have a functioning install of BRL-CAD.

I'm happy to announce the availability of the BRL-CAD 7.16.6 source code. We are nearing the end of the 7.16 release line as features continue to be added and stabilized. Barring any unexpected issues, we expect to only make one more patch release before moving on to the 7.18 release line after next month.

This is a BRL-CAD community profile, a perspective vignette, from within our user community regarding a student project where BRL-CAD was used for an interesting academic purpose. It's a science project from three young ladies who, in the span of just a couple months, went from knowing pretty much nothing about modeling and BRL-CAD to creating a CAD model of their concept with rendered images and animations.

It's been a very LONG time since our last public release announcement but regardless, I'm happy to announce the availability of the BRL-CAD 7.16.4 source code! Binaries are not expected for this release, but we will likely be posting them for the next upcoming release.

For those that haven't heard about it yet, Ohloh is a site dedicated to categorizing, analyzing, and tracking software projects. While BRL-CAD has been indexed and tracked there [1] for some time now (we were one of the first), the statistics are continually updated and expanded upon. Among those recently updated, Ohloh found that more than 17 people have directly contributed to BRL-CAD in the last 12 months.

I am happy to announce that we have selected five individuals to work on BRL-CAD for the 2009 Google Summer of Code.

We had many more desirable students than we have capacity to mentor, but we were able to finalize selections after an extensive review process that helped us get to know the students, their interests, and their capabilities. Sincere thanks and appreciation go out to everyone that submitted an application.