3D Modelling of the Built Environment

This course provides a detailed description of the main ways in which the built environment is modelled in three dimensions, covering material from low-level data structures for generic 3D data to high-level semantic data models for cities.

The main topics described in the course are:

- how geometry, topology and attributes can be stored in 3D models;

- boundary representation (b-rep) and meshes;

- (constrained) tetrahedralisation and 3D Voronoi diagrams;

- voxel models and voxelisation;

- constructive solid models (CSG) and Nef polyhedra;

- Bézier surfaces;

- the medial axis transform (MAT);

- generalised (g-) and combinatorial maps (c-maps);

- the ISO 19107 geometry representations;

- semantic 3D city models and CityJSON;

- building information modelling and IFC;

- building reconstruction for 3D city models;

- applications of 3D models (eg calculation of volumes and solar potential);

The course has both a theoretical part based on short lectures, watching videos and reading the provided material, as well as a practical part where students create, manipulate and view 3D models, and then use them for different applications.

All the labs are programming tasks (to be done with the C++ programming language), based solely on open-source libraries and software.