From CAD to VR – Implementations for Urban Planning and Building Design

Abstract

At present time, three-dimensional objects are often represented with 2D-data in urban planning and building design. In order to get all the involved parties to fully understand a certain project, this may not be enough. More and more projects therefore take use of the Virtual Reality (VR) technique as a complement to traditional 2D drawings and sketches. All the involved parties can then share a common frame of reference for all discussions regarding a certain project. Unfortunately, the technique is not yet adapted to fit the current building design process. In this paper, we present a solution for semi-automatic generation of a VR-model based on 3D CAD information and aerial photos obtained from the City Planning Authorities in Sweden. The data is imported to support real-time editing of terrain, roads and buildings. We also present a framework for importing 3D-models created in Autodesk Revit which enables a seamless integration of modern 3D CAD and VR-models. The features are implemented in a software developed at Chalmers Visualization studio (Gothenburg, Sweden) and technical details about terrain handling and speed-up techniques will be given.