Create BRL-CAD-to-Blender tutorial
completed by: John
mentors: Sean
Blender is a open source 3D content creation program. While it's usually not at all well-suited for engineering, scientific, and other CAD purposes, it's a popular content editor that is really good at some forms of editing (surface editing in particular).
This task has you write a tutorial on how to model something in BRL-CAD, render the geometry, export it to a file, import that file into Blender, and render the imported geometry. Make a region of two or more primitive objects for export -- a single primitive is insufficient. Include lots of screenshots for every step along the way.
References:
- http://brlcad.org/wiki/Documentation (particularly the MGED tutorial and quick start)
Tools:
- blender
- g-* (we have lots of exporters, use any that blender supports)
- mged (display and edit geometry, run "tops" and "draw" commands)
- within mged: rt -s1024 -A0.75 -c {set ambSamples=128} -c {set ambSlow=1}
Note that exporting geometry from our CSG format to a polygonal format can be VERY difficult. It's a black art. If you encounter an export failure/bomb/error, you'll need to edit the geometry you're attempting to export, try different tolerances, change your hierarchy, or try a different geometry exporter.