STEP is the current standard for exchange of CAD data between different software packages. BRL-CAD makes use of the NIST STEP Class Libraries code to support its step-g converter. That gets STEP geometry data (AP203 or AP214) into a format that we can visualize as either wireframes or rendered via ray-tracing (2D raster or 3d point clouds). Eventually, we will have polygonal representations available as well, but check on the status of that before assuming meshes are available..

Depending on the approach being proposed, there are lots of ways to get at visualizing STEP geometry via a stand-alone viewer application. You could build an interface on top of our ADRT real-time raytracing or on top of our libdm display manager library for wireframes and mesh visualization. You could build an interface on top of our libfb 2D framebuffer library (near real-time ray-tracing). You could build an application in Qt that talks directly to our librt geometry library to visualize wireframes and meshes. You could probably build a web interface (but this approach is probably much more work).

The goal of this project is a 3D geometry viewer application. That application can and should be built on top of BRL-CAD resources where available in modular form so that a self-contained viewer distribution could be made available to users.

References

• src/conv/step
• src/adrt
• src/libdm
• src/libfb
• src/librt

Requirements

• Strong familiarity with C or C++