Feature-based decomposition of façades

Due to advances in computer hardware, virtual environments become significantly larger and more complex. Therefore the modeling of virtual worlds, e.g. for computer animation and games becomes increasingly time and resource consuming. In architectural settings facade features are influenced by the underlying geometrical structure or even by other facade structures, e.g. facade edges made of large stones influence the adjacent walls. To achieve an aesthetic look of the facade adjacent structures must be seamlessly aligned. The modeling of such structures is a tedious work. With our approach only a few basic parameters are needed to create highly detailed facades. This relieves the designer of the burden of difficult modeling tasks and gives him more high level control. In this paper we present a strategy for a floor plan representation that permits arbitrary floor plan outlines. This simplifies the roof generation for different roof types in an easy way to achieve an aesthetic goal. Based on the floor plan representation we describe a hierarchical decomposition of architectural facade features. With an order relation on it we represent the interdependencies between the facade features and introduce a geometry generator for them.