BRLCAD 7.42.0

What's new in 7.42.0

--- 2025-08-11 Release 7.42.0 ---
Polygonal BoT ray tracing is now dramatically faster. Integration of
a new spatial partition acceleration method (HLBVH) into librt's BoT
ray tracing pipeline yields substantial speedups, better multicore
scaling, and reduced memory overhead across all BRL-CAD ray tracing of
scenes with BoTs. In general, new overall performence is typicaly in
the 2-25x range depending on the model, scene, and other factors. The
culmination of many efforts, the improvement was verified, validated,
and performance tested against numerous real and test models to
confirm gains and assert correctness. As a result, users no longer
need to tune TIE or ADRT-specific settings as both are fully obsoleted
and replaced.
This release expands Arbitrary Polyhedron support with 8 vertices
(i.e., ARB8-only, not ARB7/6/5/4) to include concave definitions.
Surfaces must (still) be planar and not self-intersect, but polyhedral
edges creating concavities are now supported for ray tracing.
MGED's nirt command use of .mgedrc qray settings was restored, which
affects output styling (e.g., showing/hiding attributes). To restore
default behavior, delete .mgedrc in your home directory or remove
existing qray settings manually.
- increased app parallelism ceiling to 4096 threads - Sean Morrison
- removed obsolete nirt -T BoT spatial partition option - Cliff Yapp
- added support for concave arb8 primitive definitions - Sean Morrison
- added example geometry model showcasing all types - Mitchell Roberts
- fixed mged crash when switching databases after rt - Sean Morrison
- mitigated multithreading contention on >32 core cpus - Sean Morrison
- clarified material_name not found warning in rtweight - Cliff Yapp
- fixed stat command crash with invalid path specifiers - Cliff Yapp
- improved search std attr table in man page - Cliff Yapp
- updated MGED nirt man page to reference cmdline version - Cliff Yapp
- fixed raytracing crash with empty BoT solid in tree - Cliff Yapp
- cleaned up nirt -L format listing output - Cliff Yapp
- fixed MGED nirt command's use of .mgedrc qray formats - Cliff Yapp
- improved MGED nirt cmd handling for large object lists - Cliff Yapp
- removed requirement to launch nirt with objects listed - Cliff Yapp
- improved k-g LS-DYNA keyword file geometry importer - Ali Haydar
- added bot support for plate mode thickness get/set cmds - Cliff Yapp
- fixed dbconcat treatment of a '/' prefix character - Cliff Yapp …

Full release notes »