Google Summer of Code/Project Ideas

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The list of possible projects below should serve as a good starting point for new developers that would like to get involved in working on BRL-CAD. The ideas below range from the very hard and math intense to the very easy, see the link to each for more details. You are also welcome to scale the scope of the project up or down as needed as the ideas suggested below are merely starting points. There are also several other areas of development that are of high-interest.

BRL-CAD Priorities

Be sure to read up on our application process for getting started with your proposal submission if you have not done so already including our checklist. See the diagram at the bottom of this page for an overview of our major project focus areas.

Project Categories

NURBS (Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines) Projects

BRL-CAD has recently implemented raytracing support for NURBS-based boundary representation geometry. It's one of our hot-topic priority focus areas with high impact and high visibility. They are also pretty hard so be careful to have sufficient familiarity and lots of milestones.

Idea Languages Impact Difficulty
NURBS Intersections: Evaluate the intersection of two NURBS surfaces. You'll get a 3D curve or a point, line segment, or even a plane depending how the surfaces overlap. C/C++ HIGH HARD
NURBS Tessellation: Given a NURBS object (i.e., a collection of NURBS surfaces that enclose space), evaluate a polygonal mesh. It has to be fast. C/C++ HIGH MEDIUM
Implicit to NURBS conversion: We implement lots of primitives like sphere and torus defined with implicit parameters. Given one of our implicit primitives, describe it using NURBS surfaces. C/C++ HIGH MEDIUM
Plate Mode NURBS raytracing: Imported NURBS geometry often does NOT enclose space (i.e., not solid), so add support for specifying an implicit thickness. C/C++ HIGH HARD


Code Refactoring Projects

BRL-CAD has more than a million lines of code so we have to continually refactor and clean up code for maintainability. Cruft happens. These projects help reduce the complexity and make things better. They're not very hard at all, but exceedingly valuable to our project vitality.

Idea Languages Impact Difficulty
MGED to Archer Command Migration: Our next-generation editor (Archer) needs to have the same (700+) commands that are in MGED. Help make our next CAD interface awesome. C and Tcl HIGH EASY
General Tree Walker: We have a half dozen or more functions that will traverse a geometry hierarchy in different ways. There only needs to be one. C HIGH EASY
Rework of libbu/libbn to not require Tcl: Tcl's C API is used throughout BRL-CAD providing great abstractions, but we want our basic utility and numeric libraries (LIBBU & LIBBN) to stand alone. C HIGH EASY
Complete bu_image/libicv and redo all pix tools to use it: We have 100+ image processing tools that independently read and write file data. Needs much reuse love. C HIGH EASY


Graphical User Interface (GUI) Projects

The primary environment in which users interact with BRL-CAD geometry is the MGED geometry editor. The "next generation" interface for MGED, dubbed Archer, has been under development for some time as the follow-on interface but there is a lot more migration of functionality still required. Most of the tasks below relate directly to either MGED, Archer, or both.

Idea Description Languages Impact Difficulty
New Cross-Platform 3D Display Manager BRL-CAD uses the concept of a display manager to visualize 3D geometry, wireframes, text and more within a graphical window. We want a new display manager that uses a cross-platform toolkit such as Qt or OGRE so we can use the same one interface for most platforms. C/C++ HIGH MEDIUM
New Cross-Platform 2D Framebuffer In addition to the 3D display manager, BRL-CAD also implements 2D framebuffers to display images. For now, you can think of it as a simple 2D graphics context in a window. Having a single cross-platform framebuffer interface built upon a common framework is very desirable. C/C++ HIGH LOW
MGED Sketch Editor Migration and Enhancement MGED has a terribly cumbersome 2D sketch editor written in pure Tcl/Tk. Archer, however, has nothing. This task involves working on either or both, but should concentrate on at least providing a usable interface within Archer. Tcl (presently) and/or C HIGH HARD
Ayam Editor Feature Integration This project involves collaborating with the Ayam project, integrating useful features that pertain to our support for NURBS geometry. Of particular interest is Ayam's support for NURBS editing. C/Tcl MEDIUM MEDIUM
Analytical Raytracing Visualization We have a lot of visualization tools in BRL-CAD, but most of them are not well-integrated with the main GUI environments. Having the ability to visualize analytic results directly within the GUI would improve usability greatly. C MEDIUM MEDIUM
Level of Detail Wireframes Our main geometry editor (MGED) and even our next-generation MGED interface ("Archer") display wireframes with a fixed level of detail when you draw geometry. This can screw performance and make it very difficult to infer geometry shapes. Wireframes that adjust complexity based on the view size would solve that problem and improve usability. C HIGH EASY
BoT Editing Our unstructured triangle mesh geometry (Bag of Triangles = BoT) is a common imported geometry format, but our support for editing BoT meshes is exceedingly limited and primitive. We need something better. C HIGH HARD
NMG Editing Our structured polygonal mesh geometry (N-Manifold Geometry = NMG) is a common exportable geometry format, but our support for editing NMG meshes is non-existent. We need something. C HIGH HARD
Graph layout based geometry hierarchy view We deal extensively with Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) which is a directed acyclic graph (DAG). We have tree view GUI widgets that let you see a hierarchical representation of the DAG, but no means to visualize and directly manipulate the graph in a graph form. C/C++ HIGH EASY


Geometry Conversion Projects

Idea Description Languages Impact Difficulty
STEP Libraries C/C++ HIGH EASY
Geometry Conversion Library C/C++ HIGH EASY
Voxelize command C LOW EASY
IGES import improvements C HIGH MEDIUM


Geometry Processing Projects

Idea Description Languages Impact Difficulty
GED Transactions C HIGH EASY
Add exec option to search C HIGH EASY
Geometry Selection Functionality C HIGH EASY
Geometric Constraint Solver C/C++ HIGH HARD
Space Partitioning for Tessellation C MEDIUM HARD
libsvn within Geometry Database Format C HIGH HARD


Analysis Projects

Idea Description Languages Impact Difficulty
Analysis Library C HIGH HARD


Rendering Projects

Idea Description Languages Impact Difficulty
Shader Enhancements C MEDIUM EASY
Material and Shader Objects C HIGH EASY
NMG Raytracing Performance Improvement C MEDIUM HARD
Generalized abstracted spacial partitioning capability C HIGH HARD
High Dynamic Range Support C and/or C++ LOW EASY
Vector output from raytracing C and/or C++ HIGH EASY


Other Tool Projects

Some of these project ideas aren't as detailed or elaborate as the ones above, but would be interesting and useful nonetheless. Please discuss with us before proposing one of these ideas.


<AN IDEA OF YOUR OWN>

Do you have an idea of your own? Let us know and maybe we'll like it too. We're very open to new ideas, areas of academic research, industry applications, and any other ways that may help get you hooked on BRL-CAD development. Just remember that BRL-CAD is a solid modeling CAD suite so keep that in mind when scoping your project.

Requirements:

  • Passion for the task being suggested
  • Buy-in from one of the existing developers

Difficulty: variable

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