Procedural modelling for reconstruction of historic monuments

Abstract

The reconstruction of historic or archaeological monuments bases on the architectural knowledge of the architects and the archaeologists. For the 3D modelling, we can use several technologies as the meshing of point clouds, reconstruction by geometrical primitives and more often the completely manual reconstruction based on a geometry measured on the field. The procedural methods of modelling also allow to build, even to reconstruct historic buildings. They are very effective when several primitives are repeated in regular structures. In this paper, we tested the efficiency of a procedural modelling within the framework of the modelling of the church of Turckheim, Haut-Rhin - France. This church has been built around an older chapel of the XIIth century of which there exists no more than a bell tower. The procedural modelling allowed to reconstruct the church in the current style borrowed from that of the XIIth century. The architectural elements built on the basis of rules were then able to be resumed to propose hypotheses of reconstruction of the anterior chapel. Even if the procedural modelling is not the most adapted to this kind of reconstruction, nevertheless it allowed to offer methods of original modelling in an open environment (Esri's CityEngine 2014.0) and, what is here the most important, interoperable with other 3D products.