Google Summer of Code/Project Ideas

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	Description	Languages	Impact	Difficulty
NURBS Intersections	Evaluate the intersection of two NURBS surfaces. You'll usually get a 3D curve or a point, line segment, or even a plane where the two surfaces line up and/or overlap.	C/C++	HIGH	HARD
NURBS Tessellation	Given a NURBS surface, evaluate a tessellated polygonal mesh. Given a NURBS solid (i.e., a collection of NURBS surfaces that enclose space), evaluate a solid tessellated polygonal mesh. It has to be fast.	C/C++	HIGH	MEDIUM
Implicit to NURBS conversion	BRL-CAD implements lots of primitives defined with implicit parameters. This task takes one of our traditional CSG hierarchy implicit models and generates a CSG NURBS explicit model.	C/C++	HIGH	MEDIUM
Plate Mode NURBS raytracing	Working with explicit NURBS surfaces and trying to preserve solidity is very hard. Particularly for imported geometry, the surfaces will often NOT enclose space so they are not solid. This task adds support for representing surface geometry as having an implicit user-specified thickness.	C/C++	HIGH	HARD

Code Refactoring Projects

BRL-CAD is a very large project with more than a million lines of code so actively improving code maintainability allows the project to continue evolving efficiently. Refactoring is the process of taking existing code and making it better. This can be by eliminating duplicate code, removing dead code, isolating common functionality, moving routines into libraries, and much more. These projects are all not very hard but exceedingly valuable to our project vitality.

Idea	Description	Languages	Impact	Difficulty
MGED to Archer Command Migration	Command functionality is being moved out of MGED into LIBGED and then shared between MGED and Archer. MGED has more than 700 commands. Archer presently has around 100 with 100-200 more to go before it will be ready for production use.	C and Tcl	HIGH	MEDIUM
General Tree Walker	We have a half dozen or more functions that will traverse our geometry hierarchy in different ways. This project aims to implement a single tree walker with sufficient mechanisms to replace all of our other existing tree walkers.	C	HIGH	EASY
Rework of libbu/libbn to not require Tcl	Tcl's C API is used throughout much of BRL-CAD providing powerful platform-independent abstractions. It's also been used within our core LIBBU (basic utility library) and LIBBN (basic numerics library) libraries, though, and we would like to decouple that dependency so those libraries can stand on their own without any external dependencies.	C	HIGH	EASY
Complete bu_image/libicv and redo all pix tools to use it	We have more than a hundred image processing tools that independently read and write file data. We recently implemented a general image handling mechanism but all of the image processing tools need to be updated to use the new interface.	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 when you draw geometry. The wireframes shown, however, have a fixed level of detail. This can screw performance for highly complex models and make it very difficult to infer geometry shapes. Level of detail wireframes that adjust based on the view size and geometry complexity 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

Core Geometry Processing Projects

• STEP Libraries (C/C++)
• GED Transactions (C)
• Geometry Selection Functionality (C)
• Geometric Constraint Solver (C/C++)
• Geometry Conversion Library (C/C++)
• Voxelize command (C)
• Space Partitioning for Tessellation (C)
• libsvn within Geometry Database Format (C)

Core Analysis & Rendering Projects

• Analysis Library (C)
• Shader Enhancements (C)
• Material and Shader Objects (C)
• NMG Raytracing Performance Improvement (C)
• Generalized abstracted spacial partitioning capability (C)
• High Dynamic Range Support (C/C++)

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.

• IGES import improvements (C)
• Vector output from raytracing (C)
• Overlap tool (Tcl)
• Automated exploded view tool (C/C++/Tcl)
• Automated cutaway view tool (C/C++/Tcl)
• Add exec option to search (C)
• Converter completion so all current formats have both import and export (C)
• GUI Animation editor/creator (C/Tcl)
• Blender file format converter (C)

<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