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.

A detailed articulate (i.e. excellent) proposal that has been discussed with us beforehand will generally trump any listed priority. Please do contact us (IRC or brlcad-devel mailing list) if you have any questions, corrections, comments, or ideas of your own that you'd like to suggest.

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.

Project Categories

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.

• 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. One of our project goals is to implement a new display manager using a cross platform toolkit such as Qt or OGRE so we can use one display manager for most platforms.
  • Language: C/C++
  • Difficulty: 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.
  • Language: C/C++
  • Difficulty: medium

• 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.
  • Language: C and Tcl
  • Difficulty: medium

• 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.
  • Language: Tcl (presently) and/or C
  • Difficulty: hard

• Ayam Editor Feature Integration (C/Tcl)
• Analytical Raytracing Visualization (C)
• Level of Detail Wireframes (C)
• BoT Editing (C)
• NMG Editing (C)
• Graph layout based geometry hierarchy view (C/C++)

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++)
• General Tree Walker (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)
• Rework of libbu/libbn to not require Tcl (C)
• High Dynamic Range Support (C/C++)

NURBS (Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines) Projects

BRL-CAD has recently implemented raytracing support for NURBS-based boundary representation geometry. There are several remaining tasks to be done with NURBS, most of them are very high impact and very high visibility. They are also pretty hard so be careful to have lots of milestones. Strong math background and/or familiarity with computer graphics representation types is highly recommended.

• NURBS Intersections (C/C++)
• NURBS Tessellation (C/C++)
• CSG to NURBS conversion (C/C++)
• Plate Mode NURBS raytracing (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)
• Complete bu_image/libicv and redo all pix tools to use it (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. The idea needs to fit in with our project goals, it needs to be specific, and it needs to be detailed.

Requirements:

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

Difficulty: variable