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, feel free to scale the scope of the project up or down as needed. The suggested project ideas below are merely starting points. In addition to those below, you may also want to consider some of these ideas.

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.

Project 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. 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

Graphical User Interface Infrastructure

BRL-CAD uses a display manager to view geometry (wireframes, text, overlayed framebuffers) in graphical applications such as MGED. Current display managers talk directly to low level graphical toolkits such as X and OpenGL. A project goal for BRL-CAD is to implement a display manager using a cross platform toolkit that abstracts the low level cross platform details and gives us a single, unified codebase. Specific display manager projects include:

• OGRE Display Manager
• Qt Display Manager

In addition to the 3D display manager, BRL-CAD also implements 2D framebuffers to display images. This is a conceptualized interface similar to the Linux framebuffer interface, but they are not one in the same. For now, you can think of it as a simple 2D graphics context in a window. Having a single cross-platform framebuffer interace built upon a common framework is very desirable.

• Qt Framebuffer
• Other Cross Platform Framebuffer

User Interface Enhancements

The primary environment in which users interact with BRL-CAD geometry is the MGED editor. An "improved MGED" editor, currently called Archer, has been in development for some time as an eventual replacement for MGED. There are many very useful projects related to Archer:

• MGED to Archer Command Migration
• MGED Sketch Editor Migration and Enhancement
• Ayam Editor Feature Integration
• Analytical Raytracing Visualization
• Level of Detail Wireframes
• BoT Editing
• NMG Editing
• Graph layout based geometry hierarchy view

BRL-CAD Core Library Enhancement

• Analysis Library
• Geometry Conversion Library
• GED Transactions
• Geometric Constraint Solver
• Material and Shader Objects
• General Tree Walker
• Geometry Selection Functionality
• Space Partitioning for Tessellation
• NMG Raytracing Performance Improvement
• STEP Libraries
• libsvn within Geometry Database Format
• Shader Enhancements
• Generalized abstracted spacial partitioning capability
• Rework of libbu/libbn to not require Tcl
• High Dynamic Range Support
• Voxelize command

NURBS! (Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines)

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
• NURBS Tessellation
• CSG to NURBS conversion
• Plate Mode NURBS raytracing

Tools

• IGES import improvements
• Vector output from raytracing
• Overlap tool
• Automated exploded view tool
• Automated cutaway view tool
• Add exec option to search
• Converter completion so all current formats have both import and export
• GUI Animation editor/creator
• Blender file format converter
• Complete bu_image/libicv and redo all pix tools to use it