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1 BRL-CAD
2 Release 7.32.4
3 http://brlcad.org/
4
5 BRL-CAD is a powerful cross-platform open source combinatorial
6 Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) solid modeling system that includes
7 an interactive 3D solid geometry editor, a network-distributed
8 symmetric multiprocessing high-performance ray-tracer,
9 network-distributed framebuffer support, image and signal-processing
10 tools, ray-tracing support for rendering and geometric analysis,
11 path-tracing and photon mapping support for realistic image synthesis,
12 animation capabilities, ray-tracing and numerical processing
13 libraries, a system performance analysis benchmark suite, an embedded
14 scripting interface, and a robust high-performance geometric
15 representation and analysis library.
16
17
18 TABLE OF CONTENTS
19 -----------------
20 Introduction
21 Table of Contents
22 Getting Started
23 Compile and Install
24 Benchmark
25 Communication
26 Bug Reports/Feature Requests
27 Distribution Details
28 Background Information
29 Future Events
30 Getting Help
31
32
33 GETTING STARTED
34 ---------------
35
36 This README file exists only to provide you a brief roadmap to the
37 contents of the BRL-CAD distribution.
38
39 Some platforms have additional platform-specific documentation that
40 should be consulted after reading this file:
41
42 doc/README.AIX -- IBM's Advanced Interactive eXecutive OS
43 doc/README.BSD -- FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, etc.
44 doc/README.IRIX -- SGI IRIX and IRIX64
45 doc/README.Linux -- Various Linux distributions
46 doc/README.MacOSX -- Apple Mac OS X
47 doc/README.Solaris -- Oracle Solaris, OpenIndiana (Illumos), etc.
48 doc/README.Windows -- Microsoft Windows
49
50 The information on how to install and operate the software, to become
51 involved with the development of the package, or to run the benchmark
52 performance test suite have each become sufficiently large that their
53 details are covered in more detail in standalone documents. For more
54 details on what BRL-CAD provides, see the documentation provided on
55 the website at http://brlcad.org/.
56
57 Information relevant to those interested in the source code is
58 contained in the HACKING and COPYING files. See doc/benchmark.tr file
59 for benchmark suite information. There is a variety of other
60 documentation and information also available in the doc/ directory.
61
62 Please note that this distribution package does not include the
63 various military-specific model analysis tools such as MUVES, GIFT,
64 SAR, SLAVE, VAST, etc., nor does it include any military geometry
65 databases. If you desire to have access to this material, please
66 contact one of the BRL-CAD developers.
67
68
69 COMPILE AND INSTALL
70 -------------------
71
72 In order to compile and install BRL-CAD from a source distribution,
73 the CMake ( http://www.cmake.org ) configuration tool is requird.
74
75 The following steps should result in a successful install:
76
77 tar -xvzf brlcad-VERSION.tar.gz
78 mkdir brlcad-VERSION/build
79 cd brlcad-VERSION/build
80 cmake .. -DBRLCAD_ENABLE_STRICT=OFF -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
81 make -j4
82 make install
83
84 See the INSTALL file for explanation of the various configuration
85 options available when building BRL-CAD.
86
87 Once the build completes and assuming you have proper filesystem
88 permissions, you should be able to begin the installation by running
89 the "make install" . By default, the package is configured to install
90 entirely into /usr/brlcad/.
91
92 You will need to add /usr/brlcad/bin to your path (or whatever path the
93 variable CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX was set to during configure) in order for
94 the BRL-CAD binaries to be in your path.
95
96
97 BENCHMARK
98 ---------
99
100 After the build successfully completes, you will be able to verify
101 basic functionality by running the BRL-CAD Benchmark. Running the
102 benchmark suite is integrated into the build system such that any time
103 after running CMake (in the cmake gui, configure and generate must both
104 be performed) you may run:
105
106 make benchmark
107
108 If the build is successful, you will see "CORRECT" numbers and a
109 performance summary at the end. The "vgr" line effectively shows you
110 approximately how much faster your machine is to a VAX 11/780. After
111 installing BRL-CAD, you may run the 'benchmark' tool as well to run
112 the BRL-CAD Benchmark.
113
114 See the paper in doc/benchmark.tr for information on analyzing and
115 comparing the results of the benchmark tests in more detail.
116
117
118 COMMUNICATION
119 -------------
120
121 You are invited to participate in the InterNet (aka "ARPANET")
122 electronic mailing list on the BRL-CAD software. There are various
123 BRL-CAD mailing lists available on the project website at
124 http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=105292 including three
125 developer-oriented lists, a user list, and a read-only news
126 announcement list. See the posted archives to get a feel for the
127 volume of list traffic for each list and to read/search past
128 discussions.
129
130 On-line web forums are likewise available on the project site at
131 http://sourceforge.net/forum/?group_id=105292
132
133 A variety of information on BRL-CAD is available via the
134 World-Wide-Web. Papers, documentation, and the software repository
135 may be found at:
136
137 http://brlcad.org
138
139 In addition to the above, there is an official BRL-CAD IRC channel on
140 the Freenode network that may be reached by joining #brlcad on
141 irc.freenode.net connecting via port 6667. For first-time users,
142 there is a web-based IRC client available for certain browsers at:
143
144 http://irc.brlcad.org
145
146 IRC is the preferred method of communication to interact with the
147 BRL-CAD developers, to get involved with the project, obtain support,
148 or provide direct feedback.
149
150
151 BUG REPORTS AND FEATURE REQUESTS
152 --------------------------------
153
154 Please report any bugs encountered to the project bug tracker at
155 http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=105292&atid=640802
156
157 Similarly, please post any request for feature enhancements or support
158 request to http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=105292&atid=640805
159 and http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=105292&atid=640803
160 respectively.
161
162
163 DISTRIBUTION DETAILS
164 --------------------
165
166 BRL-CAD is freely available and distributed in both binary and source
167 code form through the BRL-CAD project website on Sourceforge:
168
169 http://sf.net/projects/brlcad/
170
171 The package is similarly available via a Subversion repository. To
172 obtain the latest, follow the directions for anonymous checkout at:
173
174 http://sourceforge.net/svn/?group_id=105292
175
176 There is also a paid-for full-service support distribution available
177 for those interested through SURVICE Engineering, Inc., and the
178 Survivability/Vulnerability Information Analysis Center (SURVIAC).
179
180 SURVICE provides their own BRL-CAD distribution that comes with
181 commercial support, documentation, and installation media. Full
182 technical assistance is provided to their commercial distributions by
183 phone, FAX, postal mail, or e-mail. Agencies of the Federal
184 Government may acquire the full service distribution with a MIPR or
185 OGA funds transfer.
186
187 For further details, contact:
188
189 BRL-CAD Distribution
190 SURVIAC Aberdeen Satellite Office
191 4695 Millennium Drive
192 Belcamp, MD 210017-1505 USA
193
194
195 BACKGROUND INFORMATION
196 ----------------------
197
198 BRL-CAD is the primary tri-service solid modeling CAD system used by
199 the U.S. military to model weapons systems for vulnerability and
200 lethality analyses. The solid modeling system is frequently used in a
201 wide range of military and industrial application including in the
202 design and analysis of vehicles, mechanical parts, and architecture.
203 The package has also been used in radiation dose planning, medical
204 visualization, computer graphics education, CSG concepts and modeling
205 education, and system performance benchmark testing among other
206 purposes.
207
208 Actively developed since 1979, BRL-CAD is a collection of more than
209 400 tools, utilities, and applications comprising more than a million
210 lines of source code. BRL-CAD supports a great variety of geometric
211 representations including an extensive set of traditional CSG
212 primitive implicit solids such as boxes, ellipsoids, cones, and tori,
213 as well as explicit solids made from closed collections of Uniform
214 B-Spline Surfaces, Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline (NURBS) surfaces,
215 n-Manifold Geometry (NMG), and purely faceted mesh geometry. All
216 geometric objects may be combined using boolean set-theoretic CSG
217 operations including union, intersection, and difference.
218
219 BRL-CAD has been under active development for more than 20 years with
220 a portability heritage that includes systems such as a DEC VAX-11/780
221 running 4.3 BSD; DECStations running ULTRIX; Silicon Graphics 3030, 4D
222 "IRIS", O2, Onyx, and Origin systems running various versions of IRIX;
223 Sun Microsystems Sun-3 and Sun-4 Sparcs running SunOS; the Cray 1,
224 Cray X-MP, Cray Y-MP, and Cray 2 running UNICOS; DEC Alpha AXP running
225 OSF/1; Apple Macintosh II running A/UX; iPSC/860 Hypercube running
226 NX/2; the Alliant FX/8, FX/80, and FX/2800; Gould/Encore SEL PowerNode
227 6000/9000 and NP1; NeXT workstations; IBM RS/6000; HPPA 9000/700
228 running HPUX; Ardent/Stardent; Encore Multi-Max; and much much more.
229 BRL-CAD's extensive portability of course also includes a plethora of
230 common desktop and server versions of BSD, IRIX, Solaris, Mac OS X,
231 Linux, and Windows.
232
233 The BRL-CAD package is intentionally designed to be extensively
234 cross-platform and is actively developed on and maintained for many
235 common operating system environments including for BSD, IRIX, Linux,
236 Solaris, Mac OS X, and Windows among others. The entire package is
237 distributed in binary and source code form as free open source
238 software (FOSS), provided under Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved
239 license terms. BRL-CAD was released as open source in December 2004.
240 See the COPYING file for more details.
241
242
243 FUTURE EVENTS
244 -------------
245
246 It is expected that new releases of BRL-CAD will be issued
247 approximately once a month. A new release is scheduled for
248 distribution at the beginning of every month, usually being posted
249 sometime within the first week of every month.
250
251 Depending on need, demand, and activity, additional releases may also
252 be made. The additional releases will be heavily dependent upon the
253 level of user involvement and contributions in particular.
254 Information about new releases will be routinely provided by
255 electronic mail to recipients of this software as well as to the
256 BRL-CAD NEWS mailing list:
257
258 http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=105292
259
260 Periodically, training and user group meetings are provided with
261 announcements similarly posted to the BRL-CAD NEWS mailing list.
262 Several BRL-CAD developers also regularly attend the ACM Siggraph
263 conference, the ACM Solid and Physical Modeling conference, and other
264 similar conferences, conventions, and symposiums as well.
265
266
267 GETTING HELP
268 ------------
269
270 Feel free to direct any unanswered questions relating to BRL-CAD via
271 e-mail or to any of the other contact means described above in the
272 COMMUNICATIONS section of this document.
273
274 Best Wishes,
275 The BRL-CAD Development Team
276 devs@brlcad.org