INVESTIGATING INTEGRATION POSSIBILITIES BETWEEN 3D MODELING TECHNIQUES

In recent years, 3D city modeling gained increasing popularity for advanced applications, leading to the emergence of detailed 3D city models, entailing not only geometrical and topological, but also semantic information. This information is unavailable in most 3D modeling software, due to the lack of standardized 3D city objects’ representation and the focusing of 3D modeling on visualization. So far, specific applications require additional data resulting in cumbersome data bases and technical processing difficulties. This problem is addressed by applying the CityGML data model, being accepted as an international standard for representing and exchanging spatial data of the three-dimensional real world objects at different Levels of Detail (LoD). Moreover, CityGML facilitates a higher level of data interoperability between various applications. Given the great number of currently available 3D modeling techniques, as well as the range of users, data integration and interoperability is a great challenge towards the advancement of 3D city modeling. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to investigate integration and interoperability between procedural modeling techniques and BIM-ready software within the CityGML framework from a semantic viewpoint. ESRI CityEngine environment and Trimble SketchUp Pro software were used to create 3D building models and evaluate modeling techniques. Integration processes with CityGML, and level of detail of the final 3D model were also investigated.