A RULE-BASED TOPOLOGICAL
MODELER GENERATOR

Jerboa brings to you the powerness of a rule-based language dedicated to geometric modeling, all wrapped in an easy-to-use graphical interface.

What is Jerboa?

If you are looking for an adaptive geometric modeling kernel that handles complex structured objects and that can be easily extended with any new operation, Jerboa is the right tool.

Jerboa provides both a dedicated language and a software library to prototype topology-based geometric modeler in a fast and safe way. Once the manipulated objects are specified (dimension, data types), operations can be graphically defined within Jerboa by rules. A syntactic analyzer automatically checks that the operation under definition is consistent and indicates what is wrong otherwise. Once operation rules are defined, the prototyped modeler can be generated and directly exploited. Have a look to this demo !

HOW DOES JERBOA WORK?

Within Jerboa, objects of any dimension can be represented using the topological model of generalized maps [10], recognized for its robust dimension-independent definition. Within the provided integrated development environment, any applicative informations (i.e. embeddings) can easily be attached to topological cells in a consistent way (e.g. points to vertices, colors to faces, weight to volumes) [4].

Taking benefits from advanced graph transformation techniques [11], a rule-based language allows to graphically define any modeling operation. Moreover, syntactic conditions on rules that ensure object consistency preservation are automatically checked within the IDE [3]. An operation designed with Jerboa will never crash or create inconsistent objects.

Once a modeler design is complete, its program code can be immediately generated without any additional programming effort. A visualization interface is already provided to experiment the resulting modeling tool. Most importantly, the designed operations will be fully usable thanks to Jerboa's powerfull rule application engine [9].

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WHAT ARE JERBOA'S APPLICATIONS?

Jerboa has already various applications.

Physics simulation

The offered abstraction level allowed the generalization of several well-known physical simulation models (spring–mass system with or without torsion spring, finite element modeling (corotational or not) and its tensor-mass extension for a wide variety of objects (triangles, quadrilaterals, or combined in 2D, and tetrahedrons, hexahedrons, or combined in 3D), using a common set of rules [8].

Complex operations

As the automatic consistency preservation avoid many programming bugs, rules already allowed us to elaborate complex algorithms such as the boolean operations or the topological reconstruction.

Geomodeling

Generalised maps and their numerous topological orbits provide the flexibility required by many applications. In this geological context, two geometric representations are used [2]. The usual one associates geometric points to topological vertices to represent the actual subsurface configuration. The atypical one associates geometric points to volume corners to represent the past configuration at sedimentation time, before fault displacements.

Cathedral generation

We are currently using Jerboa to generate cathedral models, using a basic L-system, similarly to the graph grammar approach of [17].

Fruit germination

Using Jerboa, we have been able to implement in a short time the G-map L-systems of [16] that allow to simultate fruit germination.

Architecture

We started with Jerboa the prototyping of an architecture modeler that allows the reconstruction of buildings from 2D plans.

HOW CAN I TRY JERBOA?

Binaries of the modeler editor and of a generated modeler can be downloaded on the following page.

Download Jerboa