On the expeditious modelling of buildings Diana Santos, Márcio Dionísio INOV ESTG Leiria, Portugal diana.santos@inov.pt, marcio.dionisio@inov.pt Nuno Rodrigues, António Pereira Informatics and Communications Research Center Polytechnic Institute of Leiria Leiria, Portugal nunorod@estg.ipleiria.pt, apereira@estg.ipleiria.pt Abstract— The active creation of buildings as recently been the focus of the creation of virtual urban environments due to the countless advantages it presents in areas such as architecture, cinema and video games, and even in several commercial applications. The present paper demonstrates a quick method for the creation of 3D building models from floor plans and other data (for example, photographs) that allow the user to create complete models ready for virtual visits in a matter of minutes. These models represent buildings with great detail levels, defining exterior and interior base geometries and allowing the representation and placement of typical house features, such as furniture and material types. The presented method is reinforced with its testing and implementation in a software prototype destined for the real estate market with which the models used throughout this article were produced. Keywords- Virtual environments; modelling of buildings; procedural modelling; 2D floor plans. I. INTRODUCTION 3D object modelling from 2D information is a graphic computation area that still challenges the minds of those who work in the field. Complete automation of the process is almost impossible and results are not always the best. Building modelling has been deeply researched. However, the automation of associated processes leading to minimum or non-existent user intervention is still a problematic issue in achieving optimal results. It is precisely in this aspect that the method we have developed intervenes, by aiming to automate as much as possible the processes involved in the creation of 3D building models and to produce those optimal results. With this work, we aspire to the presentation of a method for the reconstruction of three-dimensional building models as well as surrounding environments that aims to maximise the automation of the whole process. The presented method starts with the building’s floor plans and other sources of information (for example, photographs) that enrich the models with the representation of surroundings and ends in the creation of interactive 3D models. More than a compilation of techniques, it is a new method with new techniques. Due to the automation and speed of the processes developed in this method, it is possible to use it in the real estate sector since it is an underdeveloped market as far as internet applications are concerned. Using this simple intuition-based method, any user working in the real estate market will benefit from the important advantages resulting from improved and augmented offerings both to buying and selling clients, since it becomes possible to visualise detailed and attractive information in the internet. On this subject, we conducted a survey that reveals a market that under-uses the internet by offering scarce information about properties: brief descriptions with little level of detail; reduced number of static photographs; few or non-existent floor plans. Few are the websites that show a contemporary and technologically evolved presentation, using static photography slide shows, 360º panoramic photos, 3D animations and videos. In Portugal, Casa Sapo is the market leader in the usage of some of these functionalities [1]. Because of the non-substantial technological evolution observed in the real estate market, we believe this sector could benefit from the application of our method, thus making proper use of the new technologies and opening a door to the market’s innovation. The level of realism present in the results obtained through this method, makes it extremely interesting and versatile, with the emerging possibility of appliance to such areas as virtual games, cinema, simulation programs, amongst others. Obviously, for each of these different areas, the method would have to be adapted and optimised in order to fit specific functionalities. A. Related work Contrary to what could be presumed, the creation of 3D building models from existing information (reconstruction) can indeed prove to be a harder task that the creation of buildings (generation) to which there is no existing information. As a matter of fact, these are two distinct matters: often the objective is to three- dimensionally reconstruct environments that exist or have existed sometime in the past [2-7]; in other cases, it is intended to create new structures that would also be able to take advantage from the architectonic knowledge on would-be structures [8-16]. Likewise, manual methods are often used in the reconstruction of urban structures, but in the creation of new ones automatic methods are often used, namely techniques related to Procedural Modelling that have evolved significantly in last few years [9, 10, 13, 14, 16, 17]. Ideally, the best solution would be to combine the best of both worlds, i.e. the detail level and reliability typical of the manual works and the speed that characterises automatic methods. Some approaches [18-20] explore the extrusion of buildings from its 2D floor plans. This type of modelling doesn’t take into account important elements such as window and door height, which leads to results that will not guarantee fully consistent and realistic 3D models. 2010 Second International Conference on Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications 978-0-7695-3986-7/10 $26.00 © 2010 IEEE DOI 10.1109/VS-GAMES.2010.23 60