I've worked about 2/3's of the way through the Volume II Introduction tutorial for BRL-CAD. After you get it installed, this is the document I'd start with. So far, BRL-CAD seems to be as powerful of a CAD package as I've ever worked with. In fact, many of it's abilities are awesome. The learning curve is steep, but easily manageable. The tutorial has been excellent for far and has taken the edge off the curve (In other words, the application behaves as described in the tutorial. Also, the tutorial itself is concise and easy to understand and there have been no ugly surprises). So far, I'm extremely impressed. The gui graphics window sits right on top of the command window with little or no layers between the two. You can use either the gui window or the command window to manipulate your drawing. I have found the command window to be extremely useful when fine tuning. Further, the command window is several orders to magnitude faster than the gui regarding the use of some commands. As is obvious, the command window gives bare metal access to your drawing. The speed at which the application executes commands (Including non trivial commands such as raytracing) is absolutely blinding. I don't think I've seen a faster raytracer (Commercial or otherwise...). Oh yeah, before I forget: There are lots of keyboard short cuts - I recommend downloading the ShiftGrips.pdf from the BRL-CAD homepage and sticking it to your monitor. Regards Marvin
Attachment:
pgpQCxk4EW84X.pgp
Description: PGP signature