GroIMP module - Developers notes

Yongzhi Ong and Sébastien Griffon spent 9 days to develop a connection between GroIMP and AMAPstudio. A new GroIMP module has been created in Xplo. This module calls GroIMP with an XL script file and saves each step of the simulation into an ArchiTree.

Conversion is done in several steps :

1- For each GroIMP graph node a global transformation matrix is computed.

2- Check if the GroIMP graph is multi-scale.

3- Traverse the GroIMP graph on the finest scale. For each step in this traversal, we get a pair of Nodes (linked by succession or branching edges), then a recursive function is called to reach the complex scales of the current nodes. ArchiNodes are created each time we reach a new GroIMP Node and a Map<Node, ArchiNode> is maintained.

4- Succession and Branching links between ArchiNodes are established when a common complex is encountered. Refinement (or Composition) links in ArchiTree must only be created for the first component Node(that is when a complex ArchiNode has no yet refinements (or components)).

5- The conversion of some GroIMP Node types has been implemented : Rotation nodes (RU,RL,RH), F (cylinder), Sphere. Types conversion hierarchy must be completed in jeeb.xplo.module.groimp.model.types. The function copyValues() must be overridden and must call super.copyValues().

An XL script must include 2 compulsory methods : init() and run().

Some jars are needed to call GroIMP from Xplo : antlr-rt.jar, commons-math-2.2.jar, GroImp.jar (version 3434), jna.jar. They are located in ext/groimp directory.

Start Xplo and run module GroIMP (Menu Project → New)

A panel is displayed where user can select the folder with the XL script files, then set the number of simulation step (Age) and the output step frequency (Output Step = 1 means each simulation steps are saved), then press OK.

You can find XL script examples in data/xplo/groimp :

* xl-plant is a single mono-scale structure

* xl-multiscale is a single multi-scale structure

* xl-scene is a scene with several mono-scale structures.

Xl-scene simulation result for step 8

In Xplo :

* Fix XL compiler bug for custom module

* Copy attributes from this custom modules to ArchiNodes (and add a flag in parameters to copy or not the hierarchy types attributes)

* Enable multiple XL script files

* Normal mesh computation

* Add new GITypes : See