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.
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.
Contents
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 |
| Consolidate image processing: 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 but there is a lot of functionality that still needs to be migrated and new features needed by MGED, Archer, or both.
| Idea | Languages | Impact | Difficulty |
|---|---|---|---|
| New Cross-Platform 3D Display Manager: BRL-CAD uses display managers for visualizing 3D geometry in a window. We want a new one that uses a cross-platform toolkit such as Qt or OGRE. | C/C++ | HIGH | MEDIUM |
| New Cross-Platform 2D Framebuffer: BRL-CAD uses framebuffers to display 2D imagery. The merits of having a single interface for most platforms is self-evident. | C/C++ | HIGH | EASY |
| 2D Sketch Editor: MGED has a sucky 2D sketch editor written in pure Tcl/Tk. Archer has nothing. Fix the old one or write a new one. | Tcl (presently) and/or C | HIGH | HARD |
| Ayam Editor Feature Integration: The Ayam project has support for NURBS editing, we do not. Collaboration and reuse is a good thing. | C/Tcl | MEDIUM | MEDIUM |
| GUI Integration of Analysis Tools: There are a lot of visualization tools in BRL-CAD, but most aren't integrated with the GUI. Visualizing directly within the GUI would improve usability. | C | MEDIUM | MEDIUM |
| Level of Detail Wireframes: Geometry is drawn with fixed wireframe detail which can screw performance and make shape recognition difficult. Detail needs to adjust based on view size. | C | HIGH | EASY |
| BoT Editing: Our unstructured triangle mesh geometry (Bag of Triangles = BoT) is a common import format, but our BoT edit support sucks. We need something better. | C | HIGH | HARD |
| NMG Editing: Our structured polygonal mesh geometry (N-Manifold Geometry = NMG) is a common export format, but our NMG edit support is non-existent. We need something. | C | HIGH | HARD |
| Visualizing Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG): CSG forms a directed acyclic graph. Tree view widgets show a simple hierarchical representation, but we need something better. | C/C++ | HIGH | EASY |
Geometry Conversion Projects
| Idea | Languages | Impact | Difficulty |
|---|---|---|---|
| STEP Libraries: We took over the NIST STEP Class Library (SCL) project during our development of our g-step exporter. It needs a lot of cleanup. | C/C++ | HIGH | EASY |
| Geometry Conversion Library: Probably our biggest open source asset is our extensive collection of importers and exporters. Turn them all into a universal conversion library. | C/C++ | HIGH | EASY |
| Voxelize command: Convert geometry into voxel data sets by shooting a grid of rays. The finite element analysis and volumetric rendering folks will love you. | C | LOW | EASY |
| IGES import improvements: We have extensive support for the International Geometry Exchange Standard (IGES) with our g-iges and iges-g converters, but they need updating. | C | HIGH | MEDIUM |
Geometry Processing Projects
| Idea | Languages | Impact | Difficulty |
|---|---|---|---|
| GED Transactions: Migrating functionality from our MGED geometry editor into our LIBGED library provided excellent code reuse, but now we need transactions so that actions can be undone. | C | HIGH | EASY |
| Add exec option to search: Our LIBGED library provides a search command very similar to the UNIX find command for scanning through geometry. Implement the -exec option. | C | HIGH | EASY |
| Geometry Selection Functionality: Implement a new selection command that lets you temporarily group objects based on spatial, attribute, or geometric properties. | C | HIGH | EASY |
| Geometric Constraint Solver: Our LIBPC parametric constraint library is the work-in-progress foundation of being able to validate and describe geometry relationships. | C/C++ | HIGH | HARD |
| Space Partitioning for Tessellation: Technically an optimization task, make our geometry converters run an order of magnitude faster by using spatial partitioning during tessellation. | C | MEDIUM | HARD |
| libsvn within Geometry Database Format: Our Geometry Service project provides comprehensive edit history by using a revision control system. Hook our .g database on the backend ftw. | 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.
- Overlap tool (Tcl)
- Automated exploded view tool (C/C++/Tcl)
- Automated cutaway view tool (C/C++/Tcl)
- 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
