Modeling Cities and Landscapes in 3D with CityGML

CityGML is the most important international standard used to model cities and landscapes in 3D with extensive semantics. Compared to BIM standards such as IFC, CityGML models are usually less detailed but they cover a much greater spatial extent. They are also available in any of five standardized levels of detail. CityGML serves as an exchange...

Does a Finer Level of Detail of a 3D City Model Bring an Improvement for Estimating Shadows?

3D city models are characterised by the level of detail (LOD), which indicates their spatio-semantic complexity. Modelling data in finer LODs results in visually appealing models and opens the door for more applications, but that is at the expense of increased costs of acquisition, and larger storage footprint. In this paper we investigate...

Storage and analysis of massive TINs in a DBMS

Advances in technologies to collect elevation data are far superior to the advances to store and process the resulting point clouds. This paper investigates the use of a DBMS to store and manage not only the points coming from massive point-based datasets, but also a TIN of these points. TINs are used as a support structure to implement...

Extruding building footprints to create topologically consistent 3D city models

One of the simplest methods to construct a 3D city model is to extrude building footprints, to obtain "block-shaped" buildings. While the method is well-known and easy to implement, if the topological relationships between the footprints are not taken into account, the resulting city models will not necessarily be topologically consistent. As a...