Re: [brlcad-devel] [GSOC2012]my proposal

[Christopher S. M. <br...@ma...>]

On Apr 3, 2012, at 9:00 PM, Edward wrote:

>     I have submit my proposal.
>     http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2012/plussai/1
>     would you please give me some advise or comment,thanks.

Thanks for sharing it Laijiren!  You know, I laughed a little when I read your comment that you dream you can one day make a contribution to an open source project.  You can do that ANY day, *any* time, regardless of GSoC or job or school!  Contributing to open source doesn't require permission or even approval.

You proposal looks to have a good level of detail.  Some minor implementation details specified will probably change (such as creating a "draw mesh" tool in MGED -- already exists), but on the whole I like how you tie your approach to the research that followed our original implementation.  There's probably some more research papers I can get you on NURBS tessellation as well.

The one major technical aspect that I didn't see covered is solidity.  As a solid modeling system, guaranteeing the preservation of solidity is usually implicitly more important than speed.  Basically, you don't have any accommodation in your proposal for verifying and validating the accuracy and fidelity of the mesh being generated.

Speed is certainly important, but it's more valuable (to our users) to first have a slow "correct" tessellation that produces fully closed solid geometry before having a fast tessellation that is only suitable for visualization purposes.  Both are good to have, but I'd propose including some steps and time for ensuring proper mesh closure.  Maybe do a few quick nurbs paper searches to see if you can find any recent ones that talk about solidity, or just one or two additional NURBS paper references that speak of quality and edge alignment.

In your timeline, it'd be nice to see more detail in June.  That's arguably the hardest part but there aren't any specific "stepping stone" deliverables identified to indicate whether you're making adequate progress.  Otherwise, the detail looks good there. 

Cheers!
Sean