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U.S. Army Research Lab Opens BRL-CAD Source

Posted by timothy on from the not-like-the-public-paid-for-it-or-anything dept.

brlcad writes "After 20 years of active development under a proprietary government license agreement, the BRL-CAD solid modeling suite has just been released as Open Source software. BRL-CAD is one of the many legacies of the late Michael Muuss, author of ping. The package began on the PDP-11 and VAX 11/780--before the emergence of ANSI/ISO C language standards--and boasts one of the first parallel Ray tracers in existence. Today BRL-CAD has over 750,000 lines of source code. It incorporates both 3D modeling and rendering capabilities, and supports an API for user-developed geometric analysis applications. It continues to be developed and maintained by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and its partners. Various portions of the package are distributed under the GPL, LGPL, GFDL, and BSD licenses."

2 of 209 comments (clear)

  1. Played with it in 1988.. by freelunch · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Back in the day, I requested a copy around '88. The only format available then was 9 track tape. I think I had to send a real letter requesting it and explaining my intent (curiosity, mostly).

    After waiting many weeks, I sent Michael Muuss an email flaming a little (very young and cocky) and asking "Hey, where's my tape!?". I ran across a print out of that email and his reply when I was moving a few years back. He explained that he had to make the tapes himself, etc.

    With much pain, I translated the tape to a QIC cartridge and built it on our Sun gear (I was working at an imaging company). It was a large build.

    Their 3D editor was pretty neat for the day and I did a little with the ray tracer. The package had, no kidding, a lot of heavy duty ballastic tools that I didn't care about.. That was about it.

    But the print out of Muuss' email is a keeper.

  2. Re:In a world dominated by... by UniverseIsADoughnut · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I see it can't export to pro/e so thats not very good.

    Yeah, cheap CAD Doesn't tend to mean much, also you are only as good as your file support.

    AutoCAD doesn't belong here, it's not a solid modeler, yeah they are trying to extend it, but thats just a level of evil on top of the already evil that is auto cad.

    Solidworks is one you left out, and they did change things, they came out with a CAD program for 5 grand that was up there with Pro E, but they tossed a lot of features that most never need, and ditched multi-platform which tends to be overrated for something like this. And do to this and their sudden eating of PTCs market PTC cut the price on pro/e 2001 and wildfire to 5 grand. So things are changing some. 33 Grand for one seat of a CAD program has finally become a thing of the past.