Extended interactive and procedural modeling method for ancient chinese architecture

The manual modeling of ancient Chinese architecture is long and tedious work for artists due to the strict and complex construction rules. Existing procedural modeling methods can reduce the modeling workload; however, only limited types of ancient buildings can be made, and users can only edit the building frame and not the components. Therefore, we have improved the existing methods to solve these problems. In addition, we propose an ancient building frame extraction method that can extract a building frame from an existing nonsegmented building mesh, thereby providing users with an editable initial frame. Furthermore, we propose an automatic level of detail (LOD) method; building models made by our method can be automatically simplified without prefabricated low-poly proxies. The experimental results show that our method can be used to model different styles of ancient Chinese architecture. The building frames and components are easy to edit and can allow nonexpert users to construct a target architecture in minutes. The size of the saved file is greatly reduced compared to that of existing methods. Building frame extraction can significantly accelerate the modeling speed and improve the quality of users' work. The proposed LOD method exhibits a higher performance than the existing method based on mesh simplification.