#121 Automated ray tracing of STEP assembly with nirt

[Florian Baumann]

Dear BRL-CAD team,
currently I'm doing a research project on radiation simulation and it is a bit late late in schedule. Geometry in the radiation simulation tool is represented throug a thickness distribution file in a specific xml format. Therefore I want to use BRL-CAD's nirt command to find out the thicknesses of the step model parts along vectors around a target point.

So my questions/problems are:

1.I use Archer (which is one of many applications of BRL-CAD if I understood the software description correctly?) for the ray tracing. Is it possible to import multiple step files in Archer to seperate the regions by the parts of the STEP assembly? Cause currently, I have only one BRep entry in the object tree for my STEP assembly file when it's imported. It is important that, each part is a own region to distinguish between different materials.

2.I need to do the ray trace for 1000 vectors with different directions around the target point (origin), so it would be nice if the vectors coordinates could be read from an external txt/csv file, then the ray trace procedure is done automatically and the output is reported in the specific xml format. I read through the nirt documentation and saw that it is customizable with scripting. But since I'm not really into coding and totaly new to BRL-CAD, I have no clue how to do that. Adapting the report format is described in the docu but I don't know how to loop the rays.

I hope that someone of you could help me and I'm looking forward to answers!
Thanks in advance,
Florian