3D Building Models, Production and Application.

Abstract: 3D models have been widely used in many areas since decades ago. When BIM (Building Information Modelling) and VR (Virtual Reality) become popular recent years, 3D model, as an essential part of it has been frequently asked or even required, which is both a challenge and opportunity to a surveying engineer.   Through investigation of three different alternatives to create 3D models: image based, terrestrial laser scanning based and airborne laser scanning based modelling, the author aims to help a surveying engineer to choose the proper method and tool. Workflows, costs and applications have been discussed for each approach and the results show that image based modeling is most time and cost efficient but with lower accuracy which is suitable for visualization while thanks to the high resolution of data capture, terrestrial laser scanning based modeling can be utilized for detailed as-built modeling or BIM. The weakness of such method is the high initial cost and much time demanded; for large area city modeling, the airborne laser scanning approach is the most efficient way with limitations of the low level of details and expensive equipment.   However, it should be critical to understand that there is no automatic way to reconstruct a controllable 3D object at present. Due to the limited accessibility of equipment, the photogrammetric 3D building reconstruction method is not included in this study and thus, a future study may continue with this method. 3D object may be converted to a format that can be used in BIM, such kind of format exchange can be an interesting topic for further study.