A PREVIEWING SYSTEM FOR ARCHITECTURAL BUILDINGS

Abstract

This system simulates the visual experience of navigating the interior of a three dimensional and also renders the exterior of the building under natural light on the screen of a computer workstation. This is done by displaying rendered images of the model as seen from its viewpoint of a hypothetical viewer under interactive control by the user. This system is based on a previous work which pre-processes input building data to achieve interactive display frame rate. We use a modeling program, SFPG, for modeling two DISCS buildings to test the system. A converter is implemented for converting the modeled data to the input file format of our system. Some minor improvements to the existing walk through program was incorporated for its interior of the building. For the outdoor scene, our system portrays the changes in perceived color of building under various atmospheric conditions by taking into account the spectral distribution of both sunlight and skylight. Klassen's model is used here for rendering the clear sky. A method is proposed for the overcast sky's rendering. Fog and clouds are considered. A scene of the building at sunset is shown. The experiments show us satisfactory results.