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BRL-CAD is a powerful cross-platform open source combinatorial solid modeling system.

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 mul...

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