Short Paper: Acquisition and Management of Building Materials for VR Applications

Abstract

This paper describes a workflow and system to digitize, manage and render large and fast changing sets of building materials, e.g. brick, concrete, ceramic tiles, for VR architectural visualization. We describe the use case of VRbased sampling of detached houses, i.e. the process of choosing the interior and exterior materials of the house to be built. This use case implies some specific requirements: The main material database is very large, in the range of several thousands of individual materials, and is subject to frequent change due to regular changes in the material manufacturer's product collections. In addition, a relatively large number of materials have to be rendered simultaneously in the VR visualization. These requirements imply some limitations on both the material acquisition process, which has to be handled by end users, and the rendering methods useable for this application, which have to deal with the available graphics memory and rendering performance resources. The solution we propose in this paper combines a simple and easy to handle image acquisition process with an automatic generation of image resources and associated parameters, which together form the resources for a shader-based real-time rendering. Despite not being physically correct, this rendering provides a high fidelity in representation of the relevant materials. In addition to the description of our concept, we also discuss the results of its implementation and productive use for a manufacturer of detached houses.