Richi's blog

Tag: CAD

  • sweet dreams

    For my last army service, I was ordered to Eschenbach SG near Rapperswil to help in an arsenal. It’s actually a long story, how it came to that. Compared to a regular service, it was very much relaxed. I could go home every night, which is quite nice, especially if you have a young family. […]

  • accelerated ray tracer

    In all the great online classes I attended over the last year, there was one topic missing. Finally I found an offering for a Computer Graphics class. After all, that’s the field I ‘ve been working in for the last five and a half years. The class is offered at edx.org and is from Berkley. […]

  • cmake with MSVC

    I have used cmake for a couple of years with my hobby projects, and I love it. It is a cross platform meta build system. Like with Qt, people tend to first think that “cross platform” is the main feature. But like with Qt it’s actually one great feature amongst many others. It brings so […]

  • Optimizing compile time of a large C++ project

    The codebase of our PointLine CAD is certainly quite large. sloccount calculated roughly  770’000 lines of C++ code. I know, this is not a very good metric to describe a project, but it gives an idea. Over time the compile time steadily increased. Of course we also added a lot of new stuff to the product. […]

  • OpenCL First Steps

    There is an increasing noise about GPGPU computing and how much faster than CPU (even parallel) it is. If you didn’t hear about all that, GPGPU is about using the computer’s graphics card(s) to do general purpose computations. The key to the performance lies in the parallel architecture of these devices. From what I read, […]

  • Rendering Text in WebGL

    Just like OpenGL and most rendering engines that I know of, WebGL has no builtin support for text rendering. And on top of that, I can’t use the approach we use in PointLine at the moment. PointLine gets the outlines for the characters from the Windows GDI. So I was looking for something cross platform. […]

  • PointLineWeb research prototype

    Google employees can spend 20% of their working time for their own projects. We at cubx (The CAD development department recently split from BORM) have now something similar. We get to spend every second friday afternoon for some projects of our own. The only restriction is that it has to do with computer graphics. I […]

  • Propagate deletion of C++ Objects

    Last year, I spent some time rewriting internals of how groups are handled in our CAD software. Before that, groups were just to help with the selection of elements that belong together. The grouping was only one level deep, and the elements were organized flat on the document. All the calling functions had to uptate […]