Modeling the structure of CGA files

[JussiViinikka1]

Hello,

Are there any resources, tutorials or so, about how CGA files should be organized, internally and in relation to each other?
Im thinking of doing some UML type modeling for CGA files, though I'm not quite sure how well suited CGA is for this type of
structuring. As far as I´ve understood, some kind of division of labor between CGA files is a common practice?

Have there been made any efforts to this end?

-Jussi

[MatthiasBuehler1]

hi,


I don't know UML, teach me .. 🙂


CGA is 'just' a scripting language, so you can do what's best for your workflow.

If you have multiple people working on CGA, of course it makes sense to agree on specific attributes and then each person works on e.g. parcelling, mass modeling, facades, roofs, ... up 2 you !

Matt

[JussiViinikka1]

Hello,

UML is easy, just draw boxes and lines between them 😉

Well, I'm trying to form an idea of what procedural modeling in essence is, and they way its done in CityEngine. The ideaI have so far is that you more or less create a "program" inside the CityEngine framework, do you agree? Of course you can use it just for ad hoc scripting too, but I have an idea it would be better to have some sort of architecture for the whole thing. And seeing threads like this http://forums.arcgis.com/threads/76619-import-statement-functions there seems to indicate that some practices for the organization of the cga files exits. I was just wondering if theres any more resources into this matter.

-Jussi

[MatthiasBuehler1]

Hi,



I'm not sure if I understand where you want to go with this .. 🙂


procedural modeling is 'rule based modeling'. thus with the script you describe a series of geometric operations ( and set material attributes ) to derive 3d models.

how the rules are structured and organized can not really be broken down to the 'best practice', this depends on each project.

what do you mean by this 'architecture' ?

matt

[JussiViinikka1]

Well basically I'm trying to find that "best practice" to structure and organize the rules indeed, cause I wouldn't like to start each project from scratch. But I guess the possibilities to do this sort of structuring are quite limited as CGA is not exactly object oriented with abstract base class, interfaces and so on. Anyhow, I´ll see if I can come up with something.

Of course the way the rules should be structured depend on a lot of things, the company organization and so on. At this point I'm mostly interested then in the actual tools available to do any sort of structuring. I guess its mostly limited to "import" and "style" functions in this version.