Hello, my name is Bojian Wu, and I am now a first year PhD candidate majoring in computer graphics and computer vision in University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Graduate School, P.R.China.
I am so enthusiastic about computer graphics, it is an amazing subject including rendering, computer animation, 3D printing, virtual reality and some industrial cutting-edge techniques etc. Currently, I am mainly focusing on some basic topics and working on geometry and shape analysis related stuffs.
BRL-CAD is a world leading and powerful open source cross-platform solid modeling system which includes interactive geomery editing tools, and lots of other high-performance techniques like ray tracing and so on.
It is my great pleasure to be selected as a Google Summer of Code(GSOC 2016) participant this year supported by BRL-CAD. I am so interested in computer graphics, it is so amazing and attractive. What makes me more excited is that I can really make contributions to the world leading open source software, and share ideas with all other developers, learn and make progress together.
My project this year is shortly illustrated as follows.[link to my proposal]
In Constructive Solid Geometry(CSG) system, the modeling process is usually represented as boolean operations of some predefined basic primitives like cubes, spheres, etc.
Besides, the boundary representation(B-rep) is also a method for representing models by a collection of connected surface elements. So for the purpose of solid modeling, it is commonly impractical to represent these thin solids exactly as bound volume, thus an available approach is proposed to assign an implicit thickness to each face. Simply speaking, when shooting a ray towards the B-rep model, it can generate both 'in' and 'out' hit point while the 'out' hit point is a small offset from the 'in' one with given thickness value along the ray direction.
Currently, BRL-CAD implements this modeling technique for BoT primitive, and BoTs that utilize it are referred to as 'plate mode'. My primary task is to extend this technique to B-rep model and implement a robust ray-tracing routine for it.