A new version of BRL-CAD's geometry converter plugin for Pro/ENGINEER is now available for download. 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.

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.

After a few month release hiatus, BRL-CAD 7.20.4 is now available providing several dozen bug fixes and feature enhancements. Our support for NURBS geometry continues to stabilize with improved step-g import support, ray tracing enhancements, better wireframes, and numerous robustness improvements. MGED/Archer continues to approach an alpha release with support added for interactive editing of pipe primitives, improved visualization, new BoT mesh healing capabilities, and more.

The results are in! We're happy to announce the winners of the BRL-CAD logo competition. Over the past two months, there were lots of excellent submissions conveying many different skills and interesting logo concepts. The competition was tight with a tie-breaker vote needed to sort out the finalists. On that note, on to the selections!

BRL-CAD has been accepted to participate as a mentoring organization in the European Space Agency's Summer of Code in Space! Modeled after the Google Summer of Code, SOCIS is an ESA pilot project offering students the opportunity to get paid (€4000) developing space-related Open Source software. Interested students should apply soon, before the July 27th deadline.

BRL-CAD 7.20.2 is now available! The 7.20 release marks the introduction of a new CMake-based build system for BRL-CAD. Improvements continue on geometry conversion and tessellation to polygonal formats. Progress is made merging MGED and Archer for an upcoming combined alpha with numerous command improvements, bug fixes, and interface enhancements. Experimental enhancements to BRL-CAD's rending system are also under development in support of programmable shaders.

The BRL-CAD open source project is interested in a new logo so we're holding a competition for inspiring ideas from the community! You have the chance to win cold cash, make friends, and obtain world-wide notoriety. The competition is simple:

1. Design an awesome logo
2. Submit your design before August to contest@brlcad.org
3. Profit! (if selected)

BRL-CAD release 7.18.4 is now available. This release includes numerous bug fixes and feature enhancements to MGED, geometry converters, image processing tools and more. Also included with this release is the initial (yet phenomenally impressive) integration of our high-performance Triangle Intersection Engine (TIE) with BRL-CAD's LIBRT raytrace library. There is a new geometry importer for Shapefile data and the revolve primitive receives support for transformation matrix editing.

Last week, we were finally able to get a FULL valid Coverity scan of the BRL-CAD source code! If you're interested in helping resolve the issues detected, please join in our development discussion on the brlcad-devel mailing list or IRC channel and introduce yourself.

We're delighted to announce that BRL-CAD has once again been accepted as a mentoring organization for the 2011 Google Summer of Code (GSoC)! [1] The student application deadline is April 8th so students should get started on their project proposals today.