[brlcad-devel] Open Source CAD Models in BRL-CAD

[Clifford Y. <cli...@gm...>]

Many of you on the list are probably already aware of these models, but for
those of you who aren't I thought I'd point to two high quality open source
CAD models that are becoming interesting as test cases for BRL-CAD:  the
OpenMoko phone case and the VIA OpenBook case.
Both of these models were developed by commercial companies and then
released to the public under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike
license.  The OpenMoko project released the original ProE files, STEP files,
and IGES files - the latter of which BRL-CAD has a convertor for and were
responsible for the screenshot currently in our Gallery of the wireframe of
the OpenMoko phone.  Since then there has been some third party work done
with these files, independent of the BRL-CAD project itself, to work with
these CAD files inside BRL-CAD:
http://controls.ae.gatech.edu/claus/web/openmoko.html

The Via OpenBook was originally released only in the ProE format, but the
BRL-CAD team has produced IGES and STEP versions of these files, as well as
native BRL-CAD .g files.  An example wireframe screenshot of this model in
MGED is visible here:
http://brlcad.org/gallery/s/screenshots/Via_OpenBook_part_d.png.html

The conversion of the OpenBook files was done using the new work on
brep/nurbs support in BRL-CAD utilizing OpenNURBS.

For the moment, support for handling these models in BRL-CAD is in heavy
development.  If anyone wishes to use these models as full fledged test
cases, they can be found here:

http://bzflag.bz/~starseeker/CAD_MODELS/VIA_OpenBook/

See the README file in that directory for more specific information about
the various files.

Cliff