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Welcome to BRL-CAD! Whether you are a developer, documenter, graphic artist, academic, or someone who just wants to be involved in a unique open source project, BRL-CAD has a place for you. Our contributors come from all over the world and use their diverse backgrounds and talents to help maintain and enhance one of the oldest computer-aided design (CAD) packages used in government and industry today.
BRL-CAD is a powerful open source cross-platform solid modeling system that includes interactive geometry editing, high-performance ray-tracing for rendering and geometric analysis, a system performance analysis benchmark suite, geometry libraries for application developers, and more than 30 years of active development.
BRL-CAD (pronounced be-are-el-cad) is a powerful, cross-platform, open source solid modeling system that includes
interactive three-dimensional (3D) solid geometry editing, high-performance ray tracing support for rendering and
geometric analysis, network-distributed framebuffer support, image and signal-processing tools, path tracing and
photon mapping support for realistic image synthesis, a system performance analysis benchmark suite, an embedded
scripting interface, and libraries for robust high-performance geometric representation and analysis.
For more than two decades, BRL-CAD has been the primary solid modeling CAD package used by the U.S. government to help model
military systems. The package has also been used in a wide range of military, academic, and industrial applications, including
the design and analysis of vehicles, mechanical parts, and architecture. Other uses have included radiation dose planning, medical visualization, terrain modeling, constructive solid geometry (CSG), modeling concepts, computer graphics education and system performance benchmark testing.
BRL-CAD supports a wide
variety of geometric representations, including an extensive set of traditional implicit "primitive shapes" (such as boxes, ellipsoids,
cones, and tori) as well as explicit primitives made from collections of uniform B-spline surfaces, non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS) surfaces, n-manifold geometry (NMG), and purely faceted polygonal mesh geometry. All geometric objects may be combined using boolean set-theoretic CSG operations such as union, intersection and difference.
Overall, BRL-CAD contains more than 400 tools, utilities, and applications and has been designed to operate on many common operating system environments, including BSD, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, and Windows. The package is distributed in binary and source code form as
Free Open Source Software (FOSS), provided under Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved license terms.
BRL-CAD was originally conceived and written by the late Michael Muuss, the inventor of the popular
PING network program. In 1979, the U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL) (the agency responsible for creating ENIAC, the world's first
general-purpose electronic computer in the 1940s) identified a need for tools that could assist with the computer simulations and analysis of combat
vehicle systems and environments. When no existing CAD package was found to be adequate for this specialized purpose, Mike and fellow software developers
began developing and assembling a unique suite of
utilities capable of interactively displaying, editing, and interrogating geometric models. Those early efforts subsequently became the foundation
on which BRL-CAD was built.
Development of BRL-CAD as a unified software package began in 1983, and its first public release came in 1984.
Then, in 2004, BRL-CAD was converted from a limited-distribution U.S. government-controlled code to an open
source project, with portions licensed under the LGPL and BSD licenses.
Today, the package's source code repository is credited as being the world's oldest, continuously developed
open source repository. As a project, pride is taken in preserving all history and contributions.