Back with more interesting examples. Recently I worked on implementing a motion planning system for XSI based on my research. The system is called ICE-Planner (Intelligent Construction Equipment Planner). As the name shows, it utilizes different levels of AI to do path planning for robots and construction equipment.

More details explained in this link:
http://www.inframez.com/hbahnassi/iceplanner

In this system the concept of this article was used heavily not only to run scripting code (e.g. Jscript, VBScript). But it was extended to compile and run C++ and C# code that is attached to 3D objects in the scene.

The main idea of using such concept was to implement the concept of autonomous agents in the scene. This means that any 3D object in XSI can have its own logic attached to it as a C#/C++ code and behave based on it during solving the path-planning problem.

One specific example for utilizing the concept of this article was when implementing the Engineering Agent in ICE-Planner. This agent plays an important role in the system to ensure that the path-planning algorithm generates safe and feasible results from the engineering point of view (e.g. static and dynamic equilibrium). The engineering agent code is generated dynamically based on the construction equipment configuration, loading charts,… etc. It is attached as C++ code to each equipment model in the scene. This agent is then executed during solving the path-planning problem where it is called to evaluate the engineering validity of the path-planner decisions.

As I mentioned in the beginning, there are several examples available about utilizing the concept of this article, but it is not feasible to go through all of them in a blog comment :) . Refer to the system link and if anyone has any questions please don’t hesitate to post them here or mail them to me.

Regards,

Actually I’ve two scenarios for using this concept in our production.

The first one is where we store scripts at the scene level. In such cases we store scripts for specific scenes that require some sort of re-initializing or bug fixing.
One actual sample of this was in my last project, where we were animating objects with muted camera projection. The mute option was buggy (each time we open a scene the some projections get broken) and we can’t freeze the camera projection because we need the construction history. This leads me to develop a script that is saved with those buggy scenes to fixes them when required.

The other case for utilizing this concept was used at the model level.
The samples on this case are common in our game production. A lot of times we face characters animated with custom rigs that are not supported with the current exporters. Those rigs require custom scripts for plotting, optimizing before exporting them to the game engine. So we develop the plotting and optimizing script and attach it to root model of the rig.
This way each script is saved with its associated rig and accessed every time very easily.

Now those are some of the cases that come to my mind at the moment… I’ll continue sharing other cases whenever I face them.