VEGA : a geometric modelling system

VEGA is an interactive geometric modelling system which has been developed at Carnsgie-Meilon University primarily for education in architecture and the arts. Its educational use is twofold: first as a medium for description and manipulation of form to aid in creative work and second as a base package of procedures that may be used by advanced architecture students in the creation of specialized modelling packages. VEGA is written in PASCAL. There are versions of VEGA currently running on VAX 11 /780computers under the UNIX and VMS operating systems. VEGA has been designed to run on a standalone personal computer. Currently VEGA is being converted to run on Sun Microsytem and PERQ machines. VEGA is used in the undergraduate curriculum of the School of Architecture at Carnegie-Mellon University. Its primary use to date has been as a means to introduce geometric modelling to architecture students who have minimal computer experience. VEGA may be v?ewed as a complete geometric modelling package or as a programming aid for development of special purpose geometric modelling programs. To date, one such specialized system, a robot arm design package, has been created as a student project. The development of the VEGA system is continuing. Current areas of interest include the development of more powerful geometric operations on polyhedra, parametric shapes and assemblies, instancing of sub-assemblies, user definition of primitive shapes and an interactive macro language for the manipulation of form. Carnegie Mellon University