BRL-CAD, originally by Mike Muuss, is a powerful cross-platform open-source CAD/solid-modeling system that featues interactive geometry editing, high-performance ray-tracing for rendering and geometric analysis, image and signal-processing tools, a system performance analysis benchmark suite, libraries for robust geometric representation, with more than 20 years of active development.

News  edit

2015-06-19

Recent improvements to the Aqua Tk subsystem have made it possible for the first time to get reasonably-operational BRL-CAD running on [OS X] without the use of X. 1

2013-12-16

BRL-CAD selected as a participant in Google Code-In 2013

Description  edit

To provide for the construction of realistic models of complex objects from a ralttively small set of "primitive shapes", BRL-CAD employs the basic Boolean operations of union, subtraction, and intersection, and assigns reals-world material attributes.

The Multi-Device Geometry Editor, comprised of over 100K lines of application logic in Tcl/Tk/Itcl/Itk/Iwidgets, is the heart of BRL-CAD, and its GUI is the primary user interface to the system. It calls into Tcl from C for nearly all tasks, including event handling, [logging], [I/O], and other operations. Both the large red window and the smaller rendering window have graphics contexts implemented via Tk C API, with the larger one providing a custom interactive [3D] environment using Tk Pixmap and the smaller displaying an asynchronous incrementally rendered (ray traced) 2D image using Tk_PhotoImageBlock. There’s also dozens of complex/custom dialogs, windows, and other elements not shown. 1.

History  edit

Since 1979, the U.S. Army Research Laboratory has been developing and distributing the BRL-CAD constructive solid geometry (CSG) modeling package for a wide range of military and industrial applications. The package includes a large collection of tools and utilities including an interactive geometry editor, raytracing and generic framebuffer libraries, a network-distributed image-processing and saignal-processing capability, and an embedded scripting language.

References  edit

1

MACTCL: Aqua MGED on Mac OS X, Christopher Sean Morrison, 2015-06-19

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