BRL-CAD contains a number of tools for analytical raytracing, including nirt, rtarea, rtweight, rtcheck, and g_qa. These separate tools can often contain overlapping functionality, and other tools may want to utilize techniques only available in a single tool.

libanalyze is a BRL-CAD library intended to provide a unified, organized API for analytical raytracing functionality. A proposal on this topic should review the functionality provided by the above tools, outline an API that would encapsulate and expose the core functionality, and specify testing procedures to ensure correctness of the results (analysis accuracy is very important for BRL-CAD, so checking the results is key). It may not be practical to actually implement all the libanalyze routines needed to provide full coverage of all the tools' functionality, so a student should identify core useful procedures (for example, g_qa uses three axis aligned grids of rays while rtcheck uses one grid that fires from the "view plane" in MGED - a logical API for this would be to use librt's ray bundle abilities (or enhance them if it can't produce the grid shapes currently) and provide a function that takes as arguments a view plane, mins and maxes within the view plane, and grid density of rays.)

References

• src/rt/viewarea.c
• src/rt/viewweight.c
• src/rt/viewcheck.c
• src/gtools/gqa.c
• src/nirt
• src/libanalyze
  • the design of this library's API must be carefully considered
• include/raytrace.h

Requirements

• Familiarity with C