Modelling the Walled City of Nicosia

Abstract

This paper presents our initial results in producing a 3D model of the Chrysaliniotisa Quarter in Nicosia using the GIS data of the region, and an analysis of the structure of the area s buildings. We tried to create a partly-automatic system, which was aimed at producing a realistic model of the geometry and architectural style of the district, rather than an exact reconstruction of every detail. The residential buildings of the particular area follow some well defined architectural styles, which allows us to follow an automatic building generation, based on the 2D digital data and a library of predefined 3D building blocks. Starting from the GIS file, the data is sorted, examined and processed to detect the houses features and style as accurately as possible. The 3D model is then constructed by stitching together the appropriate blocks from the component library. Besides the automatic-generation method, we have used ImageModeler from RealViz to create accurate 3D representations of landmarks and exceptional buildings as well as for the building blocks.