3D Building Modeling

My friends and I have worked on 3D building model construction with aerial photogrammetry technology in past years and we have created large amount area of 3D building data (8000+ sq km), covering dozens of the US and international cities since 2000.

To create 3D building models, we designed a set of sophisticated digitization guidelines for aerial stereo plotter operators to instruct them how to and what feature points should be collected to minimize digitization work. For example, for a building with dome shaped rooftop, the digitization guideline requires the operator to collect only four feature points: because an operator could not see the dome center from the stereo-plotter’s optical 3D model, the guideline instructs them to collect 3 points on bottom circle with at least 60 degree apart and the forth point must be measured at the top of the dome. To construct this dome, our algorithm uses the first three points to determine the base circle (the minimum requirements) and the forth point to determine the height of the dome. Once the dome is mathematically constructed, our modeling tool divides the dome surface into smaller triangles (faces).

The digitization guideline has defined many primitive shapes, such as sphere, cylinder, dome, cone, cubic, and any shape of a single spatial plane, to form various shape of building rooftops by these primitives and/or their combinations. With this digitization and modeling guideline, 3D building models will not be constructed as a pile of 3D boxes, but much more realistic.

Following 3D city models were digitized with stereo aerial photos, and recently I converted the building data to KML format so that they can be rendered (extruded) by Google Earth.

Models created with faces/meshes



3D Mesh Modeling is used to replace our previously boxing modeling (vertical extrude)





Models created 9 years ago
Hong Kong










San Diego











San Francisco









San Jose









Washington DC









Seattle








Chicago









Cleavland









New Orleans










New York City














Hong Kong







Digitization Process











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5 comments:

Goodtime said...

Nice and Cool

But where we can download the KML, personally, I'm interest for Hong Kong.

:o)

Andy said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

hi i am doing a thesis project in hong kong and i was wondering if i could buy ur 3d model of hong kong for google earth.

Unknown said...

I am working on an architectural competition in HK and would love to buy your model. Please email me at minhtambanh@gmail.com

Thank you

Leon+Nadia said...

hi, i am working on a hong kong project, i will love to buy your model for hong kong. Please contact me, leonyuyh@gmail.com