BRL-CAD

Web Page: http://brlcad.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code/Project_Ideas

Mailing List: https://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=105292

BRL-CAD is a powerful cross-platform open source solid modeling computer-aided design (CAD) system.

BRL-CAD provides solid geometry editing, ray-tracing, geometric analysis, image and signal-processing, performance analysis tools, a robust high-performance geometry engine, and much more. It's more than a million lines of code, 400+ binary applications, dozens of libraries, and has been under development for more than 25 years.  BRL-CAD became an open source project in 2004.

The BRL-CAD community is represented and developed by a consortium of individuals in the open source community from industry, academia, government, and private industry all over the world. Our organizational interests in BRL-CAD vary across the project's primary focus areas including CAD, CAM (manufacturing), CAE (engineering), solid modeling (analysis), and computer graphics.

BRL-CAD's users are primarily composed of individuals in the CAD industry where modeling requirements are fundamentally different from those of content modelers (such as Blender) that are used for animation, gaming, and film purposes. Where content modelers include commercial products like Maya, Softimage, and 3D Studio; BRL-CAD's primary competitors are in an entirely separate industry where commercial products like Unigraphics, Solidworks, Pro/Engineer, CATIA, and AutoCAD dominate. See http://ftp.brlcad.org/Industry_Diagram.png for a visual overview of where BRL-CAD fits within the various CAD industries.

Our goal is to become the best solid modeling system by encouraging worldwide collaboration, improving recognition and awareness, providing effective user-friendly features, and by continuing to work hard at catering to our users' needs.

Our code repository can be found here: http://code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code-2011-google-brl-cad/

Projects

• MGED to Archer Command Migration Project This project entails migrating/redesigning existing commands from MGED to Archer, and a cleanup of existing Archer commands. A set number of the commands selected will be migrated in each of four milestones. Two weeks of the coding period – one in the middle and one at the end - are allocated for cleanup, review, and handling unanticipated issues.
• Shader Enhancements Propose changes to enhance BRL-CAD shader systems. Study other open-source softwares code to learn new features that can be incorporated.