[Brlcad-news] BRL-CAD 7.6.0 is released

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

I'm happy to announce that BRL-CAD 7.6.0 is now available.  Since the  
last announced release of BRL-CAD, many enhancements have been made  
to the package including the addition of a new quantitative analysis  
tool for geometry models, an interactive shot selection tool, many  
build system improvements, and a handful of bug fixes.

This release includes the addition of a new geometric "Quantitative  
Analysis" tool provided by Lee Butler called g_qa.  This g_qa tool  
combines most of the features of rtweight, rtcheck and g_lint,  
providing a robust means for computing the weight and volume of  
objects while also allowing a means to report overlaps, air gaps,  
external air regions, bounding box dimensions, and more.  The tool  
will compute results to a specified level of fidelity, converging to  
a better result in less time while also taking advantage of multiple  
processors when available.

Continuing with the impressive ADRT tool suite being provided by  
Justin Shumaker is the addition of the Interactive Shot Selection  
Tool (ISST).  Using ISST, you can spin large facetized models around  
in real-time, slice through them with rays, and examine the geometric  
components along a given path.  The tool will take advantage of  
clusters and SMP hardware, providing a master job manager, a slave  
compute daemon for network distributed processing, and a client for  
interacting with and viewing models.

The list of changes since release 7.4.0 includes the following:

* configuration build fixes for Tk/Iwidgets
* fixed bug in mged overlay command handling of EOF
* renamed g-wave converter to g-obj
* mged will now work without being installed
* improved ADRT build support
* improved build support detection for OpenGL and X11
* performance enhancements to ADRT
* enabled SGI knobs and button box support for IRIX
* fixed mged startup resource bug
* Enhancements to g_qa for stability and performance
* 'make test' now runs against an uninstalled  build tree
* new nightly regression test framework
* g_qa now has option to report interfaces/connections
* mged relocation support
* Doxygen changes to source code comments
* fixed ray-trace unique hits evaluation bug
* added manual page for remapid
* fixed quick memory debugging bug
* improved brlman relocation
* added g_qa geometry quality analysis tool (beta)
* added adrt interactive shot selection tool
* simultaneous -o and -F options to rt, rtedge, rtxray

This version is fully binary backwards compatible with the previous  
release of BRL-CAD.  Please visit the Sourceforge project website at  
http://sourceforge.net/projects/brlcad/ to download the latest source  
or binary versions.

BRL-CAD is a powerful constructive solid geometry solid modeling  
system that includes an interactive geometry editor, ray-tracing  
support for rendering and geometric analysis, path-tracing for  
realistic image synthesis, network distributed framebuffer support,  
image and signal-processing tools, and more.

See the BRL-CAD website at http://brlcad.org/ for documentation,  
support, and more information.