STEP Viewer Project Development Log
Week 01/05/2015 to 08/05/2015
- I am getting familiar with the source code of libdm and librt.
- Design and Developing Qt GUI for STEP Viewer program
Week 09/05/2015 to 16/05/2015
As Sean mentioned in brlcad-devel Digest, Vol 607, Issue 1
- Look in to myriad of examples in the src/util directory
- Started a sample project which is capable of generating libdm window.
Week 16/05/2015 to 23/05/2015
- Worked on STEP Viewer functionality
- Downloaded the current version of the BRL-CAD code and build it
- Studied the libdm library
Week 23/05/2015 to 30/05/2015
- Start coding StepViewer
- First task (as Sean has mentioned) Try to create a libdm window
- Creation of the libdm window of type X and OGL failed.
- Creation of the libdm window type of null and text succeeded.
- Found that libdm is hard to work with
- No Proper Documentation for the libdm library
Week 30/05/2015 to 7/06/2015
- Refereed on OpenGL
- Created a separate OpenGL Window
- Trying to embed OGL view to a existing Qt window.
- Success fully embedded the OGL view in the main window.
Week 7/06/2015 to Week 14/06/2015
- Development of STEPViewer GUI.
- OpenGL view zoom in/out functionality added
- OpenGL view rotation according to mouse movement functionality added
- Displaying the 3D axis system in OpenGL view.
- Current Code can be found at https://bitbucket.org/milindasf/stepviewer/src
- Referring on how to use BRLCAD functionality to browse the triangles in a STEP file and visualize them in the OGL viewer.
Week 14/06/2015 to 22/06/2015
- Used step2g converter to convert .step file .g file.
- Read the .g file to STEPViewer program
- Conversion from db_i* to rt_brep_internal*
- Iterated brep for edges and visualized those edges in OpenGL view.
Week 22/06/2015 to 29/06/2015
- Looked into the brlcad/src/conv/step/step-g code.
- Found that STEPWrapper::convert is responsible for convert the .step file to .g file
- Wrote a new method bool convert(BRLCADWrapper* dot_g,ON_Brep* brep) which doesn't write to .g file but from the AdvancedBrepShapeRepresentation::GetONBrep method we can get the .step file converted to the ON_Brep Structure
- Above mentioned change complies fine. Currently I am looking how to get statically link library instead of .out file
- Finalized the code in current implementation
Current status of the project
- Currently StepViewer reads a .step file and generates temporary .g file.
- .g file is read to db_i structure then converted to the rt_db_internal structure -> rt_brep_internal -> ON_Brep structure
- Once we get the ON_Brep structure of the .step file I iterate through all the edges of the brep and draw them in the OpenGL visualizer. (This looks like the wire frame of the .step file)
- User can interact with the loaded geometry by rotation (using LEFT CLICK + mouse movement) , Zooming (Mouse scroll movement) and panning (to be implemented)
Main Challenges
I believe I have 2 main challenges. 1). How to render a solid object in OpenGL viewer using the data in ON_Brep structure. (According to the charlie, he mentioned that building the solid from primitive brep shapes (i.e vertex, edge,facet etc) is out of the scope of this project. But he did not mention some alternative method to do that. Currently I have no idea to what to do to solve this)
2). Build a statically linked library which can get ON_Brep structure from .step file. By modifying the step-g conversion code. This is not a huge challenge. I think I almost solved it.
MID TERM EVALUATION DEMO
- You can clone the code from the bitbucket repository.
https://bitbucket.org/milindasf/stepviewer/src
- Open the project from the Qt Creator. Build the project. Run and you can play with the basic STEPViewer functionality that I have described in "Current Status of the project".
- If you have any questions regarding running the project or any matter related to this project please feel free to contact me by e-mailing to dev-mailing lists (Both BRLCAD and STEPCODE) or personally e-mailing me to milindasf@gmail.com.
Week 30/06/2015 7/7/2015
- Changed the step-g conversion code to return the ON_Brep Structure. (.step to .g file conversion is stopped at the binary memory format. )
- Struggling with changing the cmake files to get step-g conversion as a statically linked library (I am not an expert in cmake)
- Since I have completed the step-g conversion to stop at ON_Brep structure and I struggled to build the step-g code as statically linked library (I believe this is a very trivial task) I thought I will complete that task later.
- Started working on How to visualize the ON_Brep shape in OpenGL view.
- Get to know that I need to browse the surface triangles in order to visualize the ON_Brep structure as a solid in OpenGL View.
Week 7/07/2015 15/07/2015
- Start referring the poly2tri_CDT method in librt/src/primitive/brep/brep.cpp file.
- I am still struggling with browsing surface triangles in ON_Brep structure.