Development on BRL-CAD as a package subsequently began in 1983 the first public release was made in 1984. When no CAD package was found to be adequate for this purpose, BRL software developers – led by Mike Muuss – began assembling a suite of utilities capable of interactively displaying, editing, and interrogating geometric models. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL) – now the United States Army Research Laboratory – expressed a need for tools that could assist with the computer simulation and engineering analysis of combat vehicle systems and environments. Lead developer Mike Muuss works on the XM-1 tank in BRL‑CAD on a PDP‑11/70 computer system, circa 1980. The application side of BRL-CAD also offers a number of tools and utilities that are primarily concerned with geometric conversion, interrogation, image format conversion, and command-line-oriented image manipulation. Each library is designed for a specific purpose: creating, editing, and ray tracing geometry, and image handling. The BRL-CAD libraries are designed primarily for the geometric modeler who also wants to tinker with software and design custom tools. It does also support boundary representation. This means BRL-CAD can "study physical phenomena such as ballistic penetration and thermal, radiative, neutron, and other types of transport". In contrast to many other 3D modelling applications, BRL-CAD primarily uses CSG rather than boundary representation. In keeping with the Unix philosophy of developing independent tools to perform single, specific tasks and then linking the tools together in a package, BRL-CAD is basically a collection of libraries, tools, and utilities that work together to create, raytrace, and interrogate geometry and manipulate files and data. The entire package is distributed in source code and binary form.Īlthough BRL-CAD can be used for a variety of engineering and graphics applications, the package's primary purpose continues to be the support of ballistic and electromagnetic analyses. It includes an interactive geometry editor, ray tracing support for graphics rendering and geometric analysis, computer network distributed framebuffer support, scripting, image-processing and signal-processing tools. Cross-platform (BSD, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, and Windows, among others)īRL-CAD is a constructive solid geometry (CSG) solid modeling computer-aided design (CAD) system.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |