[cad-linux] BRL-CAD 7.4.0 is released

I'm happy to announce that BRL-CAD 7.4.0 is now available.  This  
release of BRL-CAD includes many significant changes since the last  
announced release including the following principal enhancements:   
the addition of an impressive high-performance triangle path-tracer,  
a completely rewritten rtarea tool for computing exposed and  
presented surface areas, benchmark suite enhancements including  
installation of a benchmark tool, and the inclusion of example  
geometry during installation.

This release includes the addition of the Realistic Image Synthesis  
Engine (RISE) path-tracer. RISE is part of the Advanced Distributed  
Ray-Trace (ADRT) tool and library suite, which provides a high- 
performance triangle ray-trace engine. This engine serves as the  
basis for several tools, RISE being the first toolset to be released.  
This toolset includes a master job manager, a slave compute daemon  
for network distributed processing, and a client for observing job  
progress.  More enhancements and tool additions to ADRT are expected  
to follow in the upcoming release iterations.  To give you a small  
idea of some of the rendering possible through path-tracing with RISE:

http://brlcad.org/images/humvee.png
http://brlcad.org/images/humvee3.png
http://brlcad.org/images/stryker_slat.png

Driven by user requests, the 'rtarea' command now reports  
signifcantly more information than before including surface area  
details for all assemblies and regions being rendered. Both the  
presented and exposed areas are computed, including details on how  
many regions/assemblies are encountered.  The rtarea command was  
added to mged as well, along with rtweight.

Following along with and mostly completing the series of BRL-CAD  
Benchmark enhancements started in previous releases, now included are  
additional significant modifications to the benchmark suite including  
iterative frame computations that compare the stability of the  
performance results being observed. The benchmark will continue to  
render frames of a designated complexity until the numbers are either  
stable or a maximum time window is reached. The results output now  
describes what the results mean, providing reference numbers for  
comparison. The benchmark suite is also included in the default  
installation as a new command-line tool named 'benchmark'.

The list of changes since release 7.2.4 includes the following:

* improved mged initialization failure reporting
* applied zlib vulnerability patch (CAN-2005-2096)
* added the adrt rise path-tracer
* increased mged shadow ray selection max to 64
* added rtarea and rtweight commands to mged
* added sorting and hierarchy support to rtarea
* rewrote rtarea for region and assemblies support
* fixed .density file parser bug in rtweight
* improve detection and handling of cyclic geometry
* added a -noleaf option to the mged pathlist command
* fixed potential infinite loop bug in BoT primitive
* added bot_merge mged cmd (combine 2 BoTs into 1)
* documented the rtcheck -g and -G options
* fixed units bug in mged typein of bot and arbn
* added -W option to raytracers for white background
* synchronized mged startup message with gui creation
* added -f option to mged to prevent backgrounding
* install example geometry databases
* added 'benchmark' tool and install benchmark suite
* improved installation instructions
* fixed various typos in top level documents
* added summary and explanation of benchmark results
* fixed dimension conversion bug in dxf-g
* added deviation stability checks to benchmark suite

This version is fully binary backwards compatible with the previous  
release of BRL-CAD. This release does, however, change traditional  
organization of the install directory hierarchy.  The new structure  
aims at allowing for a more easily integration with several popular  
open source packaging systems (e.g. apt, portage, ports) that prefer  
non-isolated root installations.  Please visit the Sourceforge  
project website to download the latest source or binary version:  
http://sourceforge.net/projects/brlcad/

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.

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