Note: The 7.26.0 installers are missing the "gcv" converter, which
exposes the new FASTGEN conversion capabilities. The 7.26.0.2
installers correct this omission and include the gcv executable.
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--- 2016-08-08 Release 7.26.0 ---
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This major release of BRL-CAD culminates several years of development
effort to provide robust explicit boundary representation (BREP)
Non-uniform Rational Basis Spline (NURBS) import and ray tracing
analysis support. Compared to previous polygonal mesh (BoT) methods,
NURBS offer superior interoperability with other CAD systems, faithful
shape-preserving import, and significantly reduced model sizes. NURBS
may be imported from the ISO STEP (AP203) and Rhino 3DM file formats,
both with improved hierarchy preservation and entity support.
Unprecedented in BRL-CAD's history, this release initiates steps to
significantly reduce complexity and improve usability. Many features
are being consolidated, reorganized, and removed via BRL-CAD's
deprecation process. There are widespread documentation system
enhancements including new manual pages, improved command usage,
better help facilities, and more.
This release introduces the 'gcv' and 'icv' tools for geometry and
image conversion respectively. These plugin-architecture tools are
intended to eventually consolidate and replace all of BRL-CAD's
conversion and processing functionality into an easy universal
interface for users and application developers. GCV currently
supports import and export of STL, 3DM, OBJ, VRML, and FASTGEN
geometry as well as mesh decimation, facetization, and solidity
testing. The new FASTGEN exporter implements extensive compatibility
feature mapping for round-trip geometry conversion.
Ray tracing performance on Windows is vastly improved on symmetric
multiprocessing (SMP) multicore and multiple CPU systems. Implemented
as 'datum' objects, BRL-CAD provides new modeling support for
reference points, lines (axes), and planes. Major features still
under experimental development include NURBS Boolean evaluation, a new
marching cubes method for polygonal mesh export, rigging joints for
constrained geometry articulation, and an OpenCL-accelerated high
performance ray tracing pipeline.
* mass-deprecation of 121 command-line utilities - BRL-CAD Developers
* fixed bad args crash in metaball 'in' command - Cliff Yapp
* added manual page for lt comb child listing command - Cliff Yapp
* added lt -c option for specifying separation character - Bob Parker
* improved hierarchy preservation in 3dm-g importer - Jon Engbert
* fixed upside down 'screengrab' images on some platforms - Nick Reed
* updated wireframe drawing to respect primitive colors - Cliff Yapp
* updated pixdiff & pixcmp to only compare same sizes - Cliff Yapp
* fixed running archer from read-only filesystems - Cliff Yapp
* fixed patch-g tool and E command infinite loop bug - Sean Morrison
* improved NMG ray tracing fault tolerance - Sean Morrison
* added 3dm-g support for layers and names - Keith Bowman
* fixed color/shader preservation issue with 3dm-g importer - Jon Engbert
* added 3dm-g support for mesh objects - Jon Engbert
* added csg implicit hierarchy conversion to brep command - Cliff Yapp
* fixed crash in clone when told to make zero copies - Cliff Yapp
* fixed crash in search when using -above option - Cliff Yapp
* extended nirt to list current and available formats - Sean Morrison
* fixed NURBS wireframe drawing crash - Cliff Yapp
* fixed firing of single rays using the rtshot tool - Sean Morrision
* removed pixread.sh, pixwrite.sh; obsolete hardware - Sean Morrison
* removed cray.sh and sgisnap.sh; obsolete hardware - Sean Morrison
* removed cadbug.sh - use sourceforge tracker - Sean Morrison
* removed any-png.sh - use pix tools - Sean Morrison
* removed librtserver interface - Cliff Yapp
* removed MGED per_line command - Sean Morrison
* updated MGED tops command: default to -g -u behavior- Sean Morrison
* removed MGED -n option; use -c instead - Sean Morrison
* removed MGED commands pl, pov and polybinout - Sean Morrison
* removed UtahRLE image tools - Cliff Yapp
* improved rcodes command feedback in the no changes case - Cliff Yapp
* added brlman -S option to specify man page section - Cliff Yapp
* modified rtg3 to avoid outputting excessive LOS - Nick Gerstner
* extended burst and rtg3 to output 5 digit ID numbers - Nick Gerstner
* improved draw command manual page documenation - Cliff Yapp
* added lc -m option to report multi-material/los regions - Cliff Yapp
* added new 'icv' image conversion tool w/ pix, bw, dpix, png, ppm
- Mohit Daga, Cliff Yapp, Sean Morrison, Erik Greenwald
* ported 'burst' tool (batch mode only) to Windows - Cliff Yapp
* removed mged pl command, use plot command instead - Sean Morrison
* improved datum wireframes (yellow) and fixed arrowheads - Cliff Yapp
* added initial manual page for 'burst' ray dispatch tool - Cliff Yapp
* improved wireframe display list performance - Keith Bowman
* added draw -S for simplied wireframes, no subtractions - Cliff Yapp
* added draw -L# to draw bounding boxes for large objects - Cliff Yapp
* added 3dm-g instance reference and definition import - Jon Engbert
* minor rtwizard graphical user interface reorganization - Cliff Yapp
* fixed rtwizard edge and ghosted image bug on Windows - Bob Parker
* ported 'brlman' manual page viewer with GUI to Windows - Cliff Yapp
* added gdiff -h help command-line option - Cliff Yapp
* added facetize -m marching cubes option - Erik Greenwald
* removed -I interactive option from rt/rtedge/remrt - Sean Morrison
* improved pix-bw intensity averaging to closest integer - Cliff Yapp
* removed pix-bw3 & bw3-pix tools, see pix-bw & bw-pix - Cliff Yapp
* fixed pix-ppm to write out all image data - Sean Morrision
* added libnetpbm for ppm image format support in icv - Cliff Yapp
* added new algorithm to bot_decimate (via -f option) - Jon Engbert
* fixed benchmark bug running from paths with spaces - Sean Morrison
* fixed adjust command crash when working with BoTs - Daniel Roßberg
* removed fb-orle, orle-fb, orle-pix, and pix-orle tools - Cliff Yapp
* removed support for RLE v1 and v2 ('orle') image format - Cliff Yapp
* fixed datum type 'in' command unit conversion bug - Cliff Yapp
* fixed rpatch / patch-g line handling on Windows - Daniel Roßberg
* added 'arb8' surface area value to analyze command - Kalpit Thakkar
* added 'part' centroid reporting to analyze command - Brad Hollister
* added new pixcrop utility for cropping pix images - Carl Moore
* preliminary OpenCL-accelerated coherent ray tracing pipeline
- Jon Engbert, Vasco Costa
* improved point cloud plot visualization - Sean Morrison
* fixed program freezing bug in MGED grouper command - Bob Parker
* added 'rhc' reporting to analyze command - Kalpit Thakkar
* improved command option and manual page consistency - Carl Moore
* added prefatory FASTGEN4 geometry export support - Jon Engbert
* added FASTGEN4 illegal thickness CCONE1 entity import - Cliff Yapp
* improved help message for 'tire' command - Cliff Yapp, Carl Moore
* improved option parsing and output options for gencolor - Carl Moore
* fixed saveview usage help string and running from archer - Nick Reed
* fixed and improved killtree man page - Nick Reed
* fixed composition bugs in pixmatte and pixmerge - Carl Moore
* fixed definition of "light year" in unit conversions - Cliff Yapp
* fixed duplicate name errors in dbconcat - Daniel Roßberg
* modernized documents and improved infrastructure - Hitesh Sofat
* added mirroring support for hrt primitive objects - Isaac Kamga
* added manual page documenting the STEP geometry format - Cliff Yapp
* ported the mged Overlap Tool to Windows - Sean Morrison
* improved NURBS prep performance for UV-remapped surfaces - Nick Reed
* fixed dbconcat -c crash when color table does not exist - Nick Reed
* swapped meanings of search's -above/-below options - Sean Morrison
* upgraded freetype to version 2.5.5 - Cliff Yapp
* updated libregex to apply a fix for CVE-2015-2305 - Cliff Yapp
* upgraded libpng to version 1.6.20 - Cliff Yapp
* added command window option for pasting tree view paths - Nick Reed
* improved 'bb' command digits and units output - Keith Bowman
* improved robustness of bb command oriented box option - Peter Amidon
* added example NURBS B-Rep geometry files from NIST - Cliff Yapp
* removed "high resolution" options from all commands - Carl Moore
* improved performance of archer loading large BoT models - Nick Reed
* added evaluated shaded drawing preference mode and menu - Nick Reed
* extensive improvements to NURBS Boolean evaluation - Nick Reed
* added 'bot chull' for creating convex hull envelopes - Cliff Yapp
* new manual page for the g-voxel exporter - Mandarj
* improved performance of lc command - Peter Amidon
* updated manual page for MGED's brep command - Peter Amidon
* new manual page for the g-dot exporter - Shardul Chiplunkar
* added sketch centroid support the analyze command - Peter Amidon
* new Think. Invent. Create. splash screen for archer - Marc Tannous
* improved pix-bw to support dual output streams - Carl Moore
* added list option to attr command - Cliff Yapp
* added globbing support to attr command - Cliff Yapp
* added lc -0 option to return objects in tree order - Sean Morrison
* fixed crash in iges-g importer due to parsing error - Ștefan Mirea
* fixed corrupt output generated by iges-g importer - Ștefan Mirea
* gqa respects LIBRT_BOT_MINTIE environment variable - Ștefan Mirea
* improved behavior of mged's draw command - Ștefan Mirea
* fixed handling of extra whitespace in nirt commands - Ștefan Mirea
* renamed 'make_bb' mged command name to 'bb' - Cliff Yapp
* added g-ply exporter for Stanford PLY geometry format - Rishub Jain
* added ply-g importer for Stanford PLY geometry format - Rishub Jain
* improved rtedge help option output - Carl Moore
* fixed texture mapping crash with bad image dimensions - Ștefan Mirea
* fixed g2asc and asc2g handling of dsp primitive - Cliff Yapp
* rewrote gdiff with improved output & reporting options - Cliff Yapp
* fixed pix-ps -S -W -N output size options being ignored - Carl Moore
* fixed crash exporting mixed mode merged BoT meshes - Sean Morrison
* fixed submodel primitive crash - Cliff Yapp, Sean Morrison
* added fbclear command to archer - Bob Parker
* improved rtwizard command-line mode manual page docs - Cliff Yapp
* support non-.g file import in Archer's file open dialog - Cliff Yapp
* added brep support to g2asc and asc2g - Cliff Yapp
* fixed a CPU affinity locking bug on Linux platforms - Sean Morrison
* renamed g_diff/g_lint/g_qa/g_transfer sans underscore - Cliff Yapp
* removed mged -n option, use mged -c for classic mode - Cliff Yapp
* fixed mged -c crash running view-modifying commands - Sean Morrison
* improved kill, killall, killtree documentation - Sean Morrison
* added killtree -f force flag to kill unconditionally - Sean Morrison
* killtree now defaults to skipping referenced objects - Sean Morrison
* nirt -h option is now help, old -h is -H - Carl Moore
* implemented preliminary NURBS geometry Boolean evaluation
- Wu Jianbang, Nick Reed, Cliff Yapp
* improved step-g assembly hierarchy import support - Keith Bowman
* fixed rtweight when using the -G grid spacing option - Sean Morrison
* fixed memory leaks in a number of pix utilities - Cezar Elnazli
* improved NURBS ray tracing & tessellation robustness - Keith Bowman
* improved step-g NURBS geometry import robustness - Keith Bowman
* added -f vertex fuse option to obj-g importer - Jon Engbert
* added -v verbose output option to mged 'search' command - Cliff Yapp
* fixed g_lint and pixcount red-black tree memory leaks - Tom Browder
* added conversion time reporting to step-g importer - Keith Bowman
* fixed crash of extrude with special case bezier curves - huskmate13
* improved performance of 'terrain' & numerous shaders - Sean Morrison
* new manual pages for rtexample and brep_simple - Shardul Chiplunkar
* added key binding to reopen/focus mged command window - Emory Huff
* added menu option to restore mged command window - Cezar Elnazli
* improved DocBook documentation output formatting
- David Wood, Yatharth Agarwal
* added 'search' -params option for geometric parameters - Cliff Yapp
* search command now recognizes hyp and metaball types - Cliff Yapp
* improved spec formatting, added v5 timestamp proposal - Tom Browder
* improved search command documentation examples - Cliff Yapp
* improved archer interface's behavior on start-up - Nick Reed
* added -depth option to mged 'search' command - Cliff Yapp
* initial support for rigging joints and constrained articulation
- Nick Reed, Keith Bowman, Cliff Yapp, Sean Morrison
* improved 'search' with 'flat' search path modifier - Cliff Yapp
* improved 'search' with above/equal/below depth limits - Cliff Yapp
* improved support for sub-millimeter (tiny) meshes - Keith Bowman
* added comb -S option to stop when object already exists - Cliff Yapp
* improved comb command documentation with many examples - Cliff Yapp
* implemented new 'hrt' heart-shaped primitive object - Isaac Kamga
* added support for multicore / SMP ray tracing on Windows
- Adrián Calle, Arjun Govindjee, Daniel Roßberg, Sean Morrison
