Integration between perspective images and BIM models: Projective geometry is still alive

Abstract

The large diffusion of BIM modeling within the study of historic buildings makes often necessary for researchers to integrate automatically models and graphic documentation (analogical and digital photographs, paintings, lithographs, etc.) derived from historical analysis. The study here presented study how to intersect three-dimensional digital models and analogical images using the basics of Projective Geometry. As already highlighted, within the process of virtual prefiguration of architecture, geometry has always acted as an indispensable scientific tool for the designer. It allows not only a correct and effective representation of structures and complex spatial configurations, but, above all, it inspires every creative design operation. In this way, the geometry reintroduces the ancient binomial between art and science. From an educational perspective, nowadays it is possible to proceed with a re-actualization of the projective processes, combined with the multiple attempts to “narrate” events on surfaces, (not only flat but also curves, narrations in which a person looks, for example, beyond the painted wall in a forerunner attempt that today we consider virtual reality). The study of Projective Geometry is central, making operative the well-established practice in the perspective, but in the opposite direction. In the digital space, it will be possible to project, from the point of view, the graphic information, existing on the image (representation plane), on the BIM objects. The advantage for the end user lies precisely in the projection by category of the information, which can therefore refer to the walls, some frescoes, the vaults, already modelled.