unigrafix "escapes" for space labels, room numbers

[Seth Teller <teller@lcs.mit.edu>]

sean, will,

here's a suggestion about how we can generate space
labels, room numbers, etc. in the high-LOD floorplans.
what i have in mind here is 3D text on or near 
relevant doors, and/or floating at the center of
named spaces.

it would be relatively easy to process the autocad
layer containing space labels, and convert each to
a unigrafix "escape" sequence, see

  http://graphics.lcs.mit.edu/~seth/datasets/ug.fileformat

this is just a left paren, followed by some literal text,
and a right paren.  i propose that you extend ug2iv to 
recognize such statements, for example inside ug defs,
and produce inventor text nodes as output, e.g., 

  Text3 { string "label text" justification CENTER }

assuming that the text location is propagated correctly
by acad2ug, this should result in text labels in the 
generated ug (and thus iv and wrl files).  note that this
places space labels near the spaces they describe, but
there is no *semantic* binding retained between spaces 
and labels.

so:  even better, in the longer run, would be to associate
name labels with named spaces, explicitly.  this could be
done, for example, by wrapping the space's defining 
geometry, along with its label(s) and other metadata, in
an enclosing (perhaps analogously named) ug "def".
describe, not just geometrically.

it turns out that allen miu (in code now taken over by jason
bell, cc'ed) worked out how to associate space labels with 
spaces in the source floorplans.  for each space-label string
his code encounters, it finds the centroid of the string, and
finds the space boundary contour that encloses the centroid.
(to handle big labels placed near small spaces, i think his
code searches for the indicator line segment and binds the 
label to  the space enclosing the other end of the segment.)

thus, we have the infrastructure in place to do an intelligent
job of binding geometry and names.  let's talk about how we
can get the benefit of this in our continued elaboration of
procedurally-generated MIT models.

prof. t.