Real-time visualization of building information models (BIM)

Journal article, 2015

This paper highlights and addresses the complexity and challenges involved in visualizing large and detailed Building Information Models (BIM) in real-time. The contribution of the paper is twofold: (a) an in-depth analysis of four commonly used BIM viewers in terms of real-time rendering performance and (b) the development and validation of a prototype BIM viewer specifically designed to allow real-time visualization of large and complex building models. Regarding existing BIM viewers our results show that they all share limitations in their ability to handle large BIMs taken from real-world projects interactively. However, for the same test models our prototype BIM viewer is able to provide smooth real-time performance without sacrificing visual accuracy. By taking advantage of an efficient visibility determination algorithm, our prototype viewer restricts rendering efforts to visible objects only, with a significant performance increase compared to existing BIM viewers as a result.