Automatic modeling of Japanese ancient architectures

摘要

We developed a script library for automated modeling of the components of Japanese ancient architectures that can be easily utilized by non-professionals of either computer science or CAD, aiming at the economical 3D modeling of regional heritage sites. Such 3D models can be exploited either as part of the Virtual Reality(VR)/Augmented Reality(AR) contents, or made into physical models via 3D printers for the promotion of regional tourism. We chose as our software platform the popular Trimble SketchUp which is a simple-to-use 3D modeling software whose functionalities are all usable from built-in Ruby language. Our Ruby script library implements 30 methods that each models the components with given geometric parameters. Using this library, we could model as a test case one of the earliest Japanese ancient building, Horyuji Jikido, fully automatically. Although there are a number of attempts for the automatic modeling of ancient architectures, to our knowledge, our work is the first open automatic modeling library for the Japanese ancient architectures with sufficient detail capable of being rendered in life-size VR/AR.