[cad-linux] Re: Design methodology for an open geometric data management standard
- From: "Jeffrey McGrew" <JMcGrew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <cad-linux@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 8 Sep 2003 09:45:40 -0700
> At some level, this is really just about a CAD file format. =20
Wooo... Step away for a weekend and the list blows up!
Anyways, there is a robust working project already in
existence that's open source and partially regards your
work & write-up.
The 3d rendering software Radiance is a collection of
many small command line tools that process text files
that define the 3D objects and scene to produce a
rendering. It's very much a unix tool. :)
You can script input/output, you can script renderings,
you can make your models modular, it's got crash recovery,
and by being a command line tool you can incorporate
it into other scripts and tools, so you could, say, set
up a render server that takes incoming jobs and then
auto-emails the finished renderings back to you.
Radiance takes various text files, and 'compiles'
them into an Octree for rendering. because of this,
you can make your models completely modular and swap
in/out bits as desired just by making each part of
the model into a separate text file.=20
It already has a *very* robust way to describe
various 3D objects with plain text, and a way to 'see'
those objects in the form of an open-gl viewer.
Now, it's not exactly what you're going for, but I
feel that it's certainly worth your time to look at
as an example of something similar to what you wish
to do. I've been teaching myself how to use it, and
have been thinking that if there was a Revit-like
front-end to making & viewing the text files (as
opposed to generating models in Revit (CAD) and
then exporting them to Radiance format) that you
would have a fairly robust 3D CAD system on your
hands.
http://radsite.lbl.gov/radiance/HOME.html
Jeffrey =20
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