nileshUDHack 4.0 (Mar 04 2026 at 02:33): nileshUDHack 4.0 (Mar 04 2026 at 02:33):Hi @brlcad, I was exploring the GSoC 2026 project list and #107 (Production-Ready PBR) immediately caught my eye.
I see that it involves bridging BRL-CAD’s geometry logic with appleseed’s shading pipeline. I have a strong foundation in C++ and I'm fascinated by Path Tracing and OSL. I noticed this project is marked as 'Hard' due to the architectural bridge required, and I’m eager to take on that challenge.
I’ve already started setting up the BRL-CAD build environment. Could you point me towards any specific area in the art utility or librt where I could start contributing small patches to get familiar with the integration?
Sean (Mar 09 2026 at 03:58):Hi @nileshUDHack 4.0 Glad that one caught your eye. Did you find the sources to art? Have you tried compiling and running it? If you can get that far, that would be impressive. As for patches, that's hard to articulate as it really depends what you know, and how good you are at navigating others' code.
Sean (Mar 09 2026 at 04:01):One pretty simple one might be this line from our TODO file "use bu_gettime() in rt -l8 heatgraph visualization mode". Basically learn just enough to render a sphere or other model with rt, then feed it the -l8 option which is supposed to be a heat graph of how long each ray takes. Hasn't been run in years so it might outright crash (so you could fix that) or if it runs, make it use bu_gettime() to know how long each pixel took.
nileshUDHack 4.0 (Mar 09 2026 at 04:08):Hi Sean, thanks for the suggestion.
I’ll try compiling and running the rt heatgraph visualization mode and see if it crashes on my setup. If it runs, I’ll work on integrating "bu_gettime()" to measure the ray timing.
I’ll update here once I get it running.
Sean (Mar 09 2026 at 04:18):The last time I tried it probably a couple years ago, it wasn't working or at least wasn't working in the way I expected it to, so feel free to improve it however makes sense to you and we can review the change(s).
Sean (Mar 09 2026 at 04:34):I'm expecting something like these:
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Last updated: Mar 11 2026 at 01:08 UTC