IMMERSIVE SPATIAL VISUALISATION FOR ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN: GENERATING FACADE TEXTURE

Abstract

Immersion can be said to be one of the holy grails of visualisation efforts, beyond subsidiary concerns such as fidelity, aesthetics, resolution and other customary concerns of quality. The strides made in Virtual Reality (VR) heralds a future of ubiquitous “materializing” of the virtual world through immersive visualisations. Its ability to communicate the intricacies of a designed space to the untrained consumer cements its pivotal hold on the architect’s repertoire. The formidable prowess of VR comes at a cost: The increased complexities inherent in real-time rendering compounded with VR’s binding demands means traditional modelling norms in architecture has to be reconsidered. At urban scales, the number of architectural objects to represent will make for a staggering order of computational complexity. A possible solution to optimize real-time rendering performance is substitution with texture maps. There is a spectrum of existing methods to generate façade texture maps, but the processes largely range from tedious and menial tasks to technical and complicated systems. In response, this paper proposes a semi-automated way of generating façade textures that fits into the workflow of an architect. A prototype set-up using Houdini FX’s procedural modelling platform is used as a basic test case to explore the proposed method’s feasibility.