Towards an Object-Oriented Language for the Declarative Design of Scenes
Valentin L. Popov, L. Popova, Giovanni De Paoli · ACADIA quarterly · 1998
We propose a prototype “kernel” of an object-oriented language, SOML (Scene Objects Modeling Language), intended to assist in the declarative design of scenes in image synthesis. This language is an attempt to provide the designer with a tool to facilitate the rapid prototyping of 3D scenes. It can also serve as a tool for knowledge acquisition and representation , and for communication and exchange of data with other tools in a design environment. Advantages offered by the implementation of SOML are: (a) from user’s viewpoint: the possibility of declarative description of the initial concept associated with the target scene in terms of properties and constraint vocabulary, the possibility of quantitative and qualitative reasoning on these properties, the modification of the intermediate solutions to different levels of detail, the utilisation of previous solutions; and (b) from the implementation viewpoint: the structuring of the properties and methods in the form of domain knowledge, the optimal solution generation according to heuristic causal-probabilistic criteria, the transformation of the semantic concept description of the scene in generic entry code for a geometrical CSG modeler or for rendering and visualization software, the integration of functionality for parameter generation and modification, the compilation of a scene from components of other final scenes and operations of geometrical transformations acting on groups of scenes. We present the architecture of the object-based implantation of the language and its interpreter, in the unified notation formalism UML. The utilization of the SOML language is illustrated by some examples.