IRC log for #brlcad on 20110306

00:07.51 starseeker Ralith: I'm sure there would be, but I doubt it would be easy
00:07.56 starseeker what did you have in mind?
00:08.38 starseeker ezzieyguywuf: with what fidelity? real airfoil modeling is usually done with NURBS as far as I know, due to the need for precision surface contour control
00:12.32 starseeker we can raytrace NURBS, but we can't yet model them
00:14.05 starseeker brlcad: this looks interesting: http://snap.lbl.gov/pubdocs/SNAP_Solid_Model_Rev_A.stp
00:15.02 starseeker another one here: http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/documents/TPF-C_assy.stp
00:15.49 starseeker http://www.pppl.gov/tritium/
00:19.27 Ralith starseeker: been playing around with OpenCL lately and having fun, mostly
00:19.35 starseeker cool
00:19.56 starseeker Ralith: brlcad knows more about how that would apply - I know it's of interest
00:20.01 Ralith kk
00:25.25 starseeker brlcad: if step-g is right, the snap, tpf-c, and tritium models all contain solid breps
00:32.13 starseeker http://des-docdb.fnal.gov/cgi-bin/ShowDocument?docid=4041&version=1 - iges files
00:34.51 starseeker http://www-eng.lbl.gov/~hoff/ALICE/
01:04.39 starseeker that's actually fairly nifty: http://des-docdb.fnal.gov/0040/004041/001/BLANCO-DECAM%20MODEL.bmp
01:25.01 starseeker oh, wow
01:25.05 starseeker http://des-docdb.fnal.gov/cgi-bin/ShowDocument?docid=336&version=22
01:25.11 starseeker http://des-docdb.fnal.gov/0003/000336/022/BLANCO%20STEP%20FILE%20AUG%2031%202009.jpg
01:40.57 brlcad ezzieyguywuf: you shouldn't have to draw to cp -- you only have to draw if you intend to modify/edit them
01:49.32 brlcad vtts: yes, they pretty much are all accessible, though some are really tricky on the command line or are completely undocumented or assume tk or ...
01:52.04 brlcad vtts: to turn model axes on/off, see the 'rset' command -- in particular "rset ax", "rset ax model_draw 1"
02:06.07 brlcad to set multipane, it takes two commands: set mged_gui(id_0,multi_pande) 1 ; setmv id_0
02:07.50 brlcad oops, not pande :) pane
02:13.14 brlcad setting the active pane is similar: set mged_gui(id_0,dm_loc) ul ; set_active_dm id_0
02:13.27 brlcad ul | ur | ll | lr
02:17.38 brlcad ezzieyguywuf: yeah, something doesn't sound right -- that should be nearly instantaneous, can post your .g and I'll take a look at it, but from your cpu monitor something is definitely fishy with them both reporting ~90%
02:18.59 brlcad Ralith: there's always interest in improving raytrace performance, so long as it's validated too ... it's really easy to go fast, it's a lot harder to go fast and be verifiably correct
02:20.48 brlcad starseeker: woot! that's an awesome iges find ...
02:21.07 brlcad 220MB engine model
02:26.08 Ralith brlcad: what all's involved in ensuring validity?
02:28.01 brlcad depends on the type of changes
02:29.41 brlcad but usually, current behavior is considered a baseline, regression tests are set up, then the new implementation is compared to the existing/old implementation, and any differences beyond floating point tolerance have to be explainable (or ideally, no differences)
02:30.28 brlcad basically the new has to be compared to the current and differences have to be explainable
02:30.42 brlcad even subtle grazing cases
02:32.26 brlcad for our practical purposes, the common testing we usually perform are to have baseline raytrace images, then generate a new set of images with the new code
02:33.16 cjdevlin could this (eventually) be useful in maintaining a windows build: http://coapp.org/ ?\
02:33.45 brlcad 1 RGB value difference in any one channel ("off-by-one") is considered ok; anything more is considered a deviation that is an error in one of the two implementations
02:34.45 brlcad cjdevlin: for smaller projects that don't do proper external dependency management, probably
02:35.22 brlcad otherwise, it's not very interesting since we ship an exe that has everthing needed to run, and we have everything needed to compile from source with a checkout
03:14.14 Ralith sounds fairly straightforward
03:17.54 brlcad yep, the process is pretty simple -- actually figuring out why something ends up different is the hard part
03:18.08 brlcad especially for grazing
03:18.34 brlcad can't brush anything off as just computation difference
03:41.54 brlcad starseeker: I think I've now downloaded almost everything you listed and a lot more :)
04:17.43 starseeker brlcad: heh - what else did you find?
04:18.23 starseeker concentrated on the BLANCO models from fermi due to bandwidth issues...
04:19.49 starseeker dunno for the life of me why they didn't gzip the step/iges files, it makes an enormous difference
06:05.45 brlcad just more models
06:06.04 brlcad all related to those projects
06:06.17 brlcad a few other peripheral items, drawings
06:19.11 ezzieyguywuf brlcad: still want to see the .g for my toy truck? I moved on to the walkie-talkie and had no slowness with that.
06:19.36 ezzieyguywuf as far as my airfoil questions, I have some x-y coordinate files with about, I dunno, 200 points. That's as high a fidelity as I need.
06:19.53 ezzieyguywuf I know NACA airfoils have an equation associated with them, and it'd be great to be able to model those...
06:20.11 ezzieyguywuf http://ompldr.org/vN29sMg <--- truck.g
07:29.26 *** join/#brlcad epileg (~epileg@unaffiliated/epileg)
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12:24.50 starseeker ezzieyguywuf: airfoil shapes are a little bit tricky
12:26.34 starseeker you might be able to get close-ish with ell, rpc, rhc, and friends in various combinations but the primitive paramaters there aren't likely to correspond to the airfoil parameters, and to really do an airfoil shape properly you almost certainly need NURBS
12:27.18 starseeker if you have xy points, an interesting possibility might be to create a proc-db that took those xy points and generated spline curves with them...
12:27.42 starseeker but that's not going to be easy
12:33.04 vtts whats is the command equivalent for "Move Face 1234" for later use with tra?
12:36.14 starseeker vtts: um... unfortunately, I don't know of any way to select a particular face other than the gui
12:36.37 starseeker there may be one, but if so I don't know offhand what it is
12:37.01 starseeker would have to dig into the source code
12:37.27 vtts the menu executes: press "Move Face 1234"
12:38.40 vtts or something like that
12:40.05 vtts although facedef does something like that in one shot
12:43.17 vtts just would be nice to have an alternative which works with offsets
16:13.34 *** join/#brlcad Stattrav (~Stattrav@117.192.130.135)
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17:43.06 starseeker turns on all the warnings for opennurbs and watches the slaughter... ho boy
17:44.14 starseeker lot of unsafe floating point comparisons... wonder if I can safely script a search/replace for those with a near_zero macro...
17:45.27 starseeker mutter... unused params too... may need the UNUSED macro
17:46.16 starseeker yeah, probably not scriptable
19:38.44 ezzieyguywuf starseeker: so, tl;dr is that there is not really a good way to make an accurate airfoil using brl-cad at the moment?
19:38.55 ezzieyguywuf I'll be rapid-prototyping this thing, so a 'ruff estimate' won't suffice.
19:39.32 starseeker ezzieyguywuf: yeah, that's an accurate statement
19:43.53 ezzieyguywuf grumbles.
20:00.38 brlcad ezzieyguywuf: you could import your 200ish points into BRL-CAD directly as a point cloud or polygonal mesh data, but the problem will be deriving a smooth surface that fit those points
20:01.09 brlcad without knowing the equations, anything you create is going to be an approximation
20:01.28 ezzieyguywuf brlcad: I know the equation, I found it in wikipedia :-P
20:01.39 brlcad you can make a perfect-fit surface for those 200ish points (using a smoothed mesh), but it'll still be a mesh
20:02.02 ezzieyguywuf I see where the problem is though: usually, I import the 2D airfoil data and extrude it, but in brl-cad we work with solid primitives from the get-go
20:02.25 brlcad we support extrusions from 2D
20:02.33 ezzieyguywuf really? how?
20:02.38 brlcad our 2D shapes support points, polylines, arcs, and bsplines
20:03.09 brlcad it's not great for interactive editing, to say the least -- meant more for data import -- but it's possible
20:03.12 brlcad http://brlcad.org/wiki/Sketch
20:03.36 ezzieyguywuf Hrm, maybe I haven't read enough of the documenation, but from everything I've done its 'create a box, create another smaller one and subtract that from the first' etc etc
20:03.48 brlcad easier would probably be to mode the 2D sketch in QCAD, export that as dxf, import into BRL-CAD as a sketch, then extrude
20:04.06 brlcad sketch isn't going to be covered by that tutorial series
20:04.19 brlcad there are a half dozen or more advanced primitives like that
20:04.55 ezzieyguywuf interesting.
20:07.55 starseeker needs to study doxygen some.. will have to be careful here.
20:08.11 starseeker conversion isn't automatable, from the looks of it
20:09.35 starseeker icu is a good example at least... *read*read*read*
21:07.42 *** join/#brlcad Stattrav (~Stattrav@117.192.135.227)
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21:12.06 vtts how to make wireframe with hidden lines? "z clipping" doesn't seem to work :/
21:52.20 *** join/#brlcad kanzure_ (~kanzure@bioinformatics.org)
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