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 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 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.
- 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
