Semi-automatic Virtual Reconstruction of Ancient Roman Houses

Abstract

Video Games may be used with different applications in mind, for entertainment, training and simulation or even as teaching tools. However, the production of contents for such games, namely game scenarios with virtual worlds composed by cities and related elements (streets, buildings, furniture and so on) may require a laborious effort by multidisciplinary teams which lead to an expensive and time consuming solution. In order to avoid the development burden, procedural modeling techniques have been created and applied to generate virtual models of buildings and cities expeditiously with high degree of detail and realism. Nevertheless, most of the existing techniques use complex sets of rules to produce models without being aware of the architectonic structures and its relationships. Thereby, in order to simplify the generation process and rule dealing we propose, in this paper, an ontology-based procedural modeling methodology which integrates an ontological structure, describing city elements and the relationships between each other, and a combined set of procedural techniques to generate roman houses. The preliminary results point to a method capable of producing roman houses expeditiously, including the interiors and the exteriors.