Semiautomated and interactive construction of 3D urban terrains

We have developed a set of tools that attack the problem of rapid construction of 3D urban terrains containing buildings, roads, trees, and other features. Heretofore, the process of creating such databases has been painstaking, with no integrated set of tools to model individual buildings, apply textures, place objects accurately with respect to other objects, and insert them into a database structure appropriate for real-time display. Since fully automated techniques for routinely building 3D urban environments using machine vision have not yet been entirely successful, our approach has been to build a set of semiautomated tools that support and make efficient a human interpreter, running a PC under Windows NT.