A Call to Arms (and Contributors)

BRL-CAD (pronounced be-are-el-cad) is a powerful, cross-platform, open source solid modeling system that includes interactive three-dimensional (3D) solid geometry editing, high-performance ray tracing support for rendering and geometric analysis, network-distributed framebuffer support, image and signal-processing tools, path tracing and photon mapping support for realistic image synthesis, a system performance analysis benchmark suite, an embedded scripting interface, and libraries for robust high-performance geometric representation and analysis.

For more than two decades, BRL-CAD has been the primary solid modeling CAD package used by the U.S. government to help model military systems. The package has also been used in a wide range of military, academic, and industrial applications, including the design and analysis of vehicles, mechanical parts, and architecture. Other uses have included radiation dose planning, medical visualization, terrain modeling, constructive solid geometry (CSG), modeling concepts, computer graphics education and system performance benchmark testing.

BRL-CAD supports a wide variety of geometric representations, including an extensive set of traditional implicit "primitive shapes" (such as boxes, ellipsoids, cones, and tori) as well as explicit primitives made from collections of uniform B-spline surfaces, non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS) surfaces, n-manifold geometry (NMG), and purely faceted polygonal mesh geometry. All geometric objects may be combined using boolean set-theoretic CSG operations such as union, intersection and difference.

Overall, BRL-CAD contains more than 400 tools, utilities, and applications and has been designed to operate on many common operating system environments, including BSD, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, and Windows. The package is distributed in binary and source code form as Free Open Source Software (FOSS), provided under Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved license terms.

BRL-CAD was originally conceived and written by the late Michael Muuss, the inventor of the popular PING network program. In 1979, the U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL) (the agency responsible for creating ENIAC, the world’s first general-purpose electronic computer in the 1940s) identified a need for tools that could assist with the computer simulations and analysis of combat vehicle systems and environments. When no existing CAD package was found to be adequate for this specialized purpose, Mike and fellow software developers began developing and assembling a unique suite of utilities capable of interactively displaying, editing, and interrogating geometric models. Those early efforts subsequently became the foundation on which BRL-CAD was built.

Development of BRL-CAD as a unified software package began in 1983, and its first public release came in 1984. Then, in 2004, BRL-CAD was converted from a limited-distribution U.S. government-controlled code to an open source project, with portions licensed under the LGPL and BSD licenses.

Today, the package’s source code repository is credited as being the world’s oldest, continuously developed open source repository. As a project, pride is taken in preserving all history and contributions.

The ongoing vision for BRL-CAD development is to provide a robust, powerful, flexible, and comprehensive solid modeling system that includes:

All CAD packages are not alike. Among the many strengths of the BRL-CAD package are the following:

With BRL-CAD being a part of the open source community since 2004, contributors from all over the world are able to enhance the features and functions of the package in many different ways. In return, these contributors have had a unique opportunity to:

If you would like to be a BRL-CAD contributor, the primary areas currently identified for future development and enhancement include the following:

Let the contributions begin!