Automation in Construction 14 (2005) 287 – 295 www.elsevier.com/locate/autcon
Visualisation in architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) Dino Bouchlaghem*, Huiping Shang, Jennifer Whyte, Abdulkadir Ganah Department of Civil and Building Engineering, Loughborough University, Loughborough, Leicestershire, LE11 3TU, UK Received 1 February 2004; received in revised form 1 July 2004; accepted 1 August 2004
Abstract In the architecture, engineering and construction industries, computer visualization usage can cover the whole lifecycle of a product from presentation of initial concepts to the final stages of production and can also extend to maintenance issues. Threedimensional walkthroughs can be created from hand drawn sketches at the very early stages of the design process. Threedimensional models can be used by design teams to communicate design intent to client and users and to compare and evaluate design options. During more advanced stages of design, three-dimensional representations can be used to check the integrity of services coordination, accessibility and maintainability. During construction, visualization can facilitate the interpretation of design details by site operatives. The concept of visualization is not limited to modeling physical objects but can extend to the representation of abstract data sets of the type obtained from simulation programs used in performance assessment or from Computation Fluid Dynamics (CFD) applications. This paper will review the application of visualization in the process of design and construction and then present findings from three research projects that made use of some of these techniques at various stages of the process: for collaborative working during concept design stage, for design development and marketing in the house building sector, and for the modeling of design details during the construction stage. D 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Visualisation; Architecture; Engineering; Construction
1. Introduction In design applications, visualization is not an end in itself. The process of design and visualization should be iterative, with changes made as a result of insights gained through visualization propagated into the next version of the design. The iterative nature of * Corresponding author. E-mail address:
[email protected] (D. Bouchlaghem). 0926-5805/$ - see front matter D 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.autcon.2004.08.012
this process requires adequate software support and thought processes should not be interrupted by a requirement to translate the design concepts into software terms for visualization [1]. The design of the urban environment involves many stakeholders. These different stakeholders, who view the process from different perspectives, include professionals such as engineers, architects, and planners and non-specialists such as clients and users. Collaborative building design requires a shared understanding to be reached between all of the parties
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involved. 3D visualization techniques can facilitate this shared understanding across interdisciplinary groups. Virtual Reality (VR), for example, offers a natural medium for building design providing threedimensional visualization that can be manipulated in real-time and can be used collaboratively to explore design options and simulate different stages of the construction process. In the future, it may be possible to generate and print two-dimensional CAD drawings directly from the VR models used for architectural design. However, in order for the use of VR to mature to such a level, the integration of its use with existing technologies such as CAD needs to become the focus of research [2], and appropriate standards and protocols need to be developed. In this paper applications and benefits of 3D visualization and virtual reality in the built environment field are reviewed followed by the presentation of three case study applications where different visualization techniques are implemented and trailed at different stages of the design and construction process, early conceptual design, design development, and finally on site construction. Conclusion are then drawn, based on this work, regarding the barriers in the way of realizing full benefits from visualization technologies in the AEC industry.
2. Visualization and VR in AEC
manner [7]. Visualization can also be used to model the construction sequence in order to simulate and monitor site progress. This is done using a preprepared library of 3D graphical images of building components, facilities etc. and their related activities, and generate models representing views of the construction sequence at any given time of the process [8]. At a larger scale of visualization Web-based Virtual Reality techniques generated a lot of activity in Urban modeling which led to the introduction of the concept of bVirtual CitiesQ [9]. The most popular approach in the development of these 3D models is using VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language), which is a Web modeling language that is able to construct objects in three dimensions. Another application of visualization technologies, which is gaining momentum in this field of research, is environmental simulation for landscape design practice. Here many attempts were made to demonstrate the use of VR in environmental design [10–17] highlighting the limitations and problems still to be overcome. Most of these studies highlighted the benefits of future potential that visualization technologies can offer in the field of environmental simulation. Furthermore, the use of some of these techniques for the environmental assessment of new developments has already been demonstrated through a number of examples including the Tower of London project [18] and new developments in the city centre of Bath [19].
2.1. Building design and construction 2.2. Collaborative environments Architectural design has been the main driving force for developments in 3D modeling and Virtual Reality. By allowing architects to visualize and immerse themselves in the their designs, a much clearer understanding is gained of both the qualitative and quantitative nature of the space they are designing. Visualization and VR enable designers to evaluate proportion and scale using intuitive interactive modeling environments [3] and simulate the effects of lighting, ventilation and acoustics in internal environments [4,5]. The use of visualization in this area also includes the simulation of egress from buildings for the design of fire escape routes [6]. As a visualization tool VR is also used to communicate design ideas from designers to clients by generating walkthrough models to test the design with the clients in a more direct
Visualization technologies such as VR have given birth to Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) within which users are virtually co-located and can interact with one another. One example of this is the Virtual Meeting Room (VMR), which represents an extension of the concept of desktop video-conferencing. In a virtual meeting room, team members are able to interact intuitively in 3D space and feel as though they were all in the same room. This is considered to be more realistic than desktop conferencing but requires the use of appropriate metaphors to represent both real world objects and, the collaborating parties. It is essential in VMR that normal meeting room decorum is observed and that all members of the team can see and hear one another
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[20]. This technology is still in its infancy and does not at present support realistic pictorial representation of the parties present in a meeting. Collaborative virtual environments can also be a medium for the remote collaboration of urban designers, and the discussion of urban proposals by the general public. At present the benefits that visualization and VR can bring to the construction industry are fully appreciated by the majority of practitioners. However despite the continually falling costs associated with the hardware and software, there remains a big obstacle to its full uptake, this is the low compatibility between VR and the existing CAD infrastructures making its implementation costly due to the resource intensive task of creating the models.
3. Case studies of visualisation applications in the AEC industry 3.1. Visualisation at conceptual design stage This project is investigating the particular needs of concurrent conceptual design, a challenging area requiring the development of novel techniques to deal with the designers’ needs to rapidly develop and assess ideas. At the core of these needs is the ability to
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collaboratively access and use visualisation tools at an early stage of design for the visualisation of design concepts and collaborative design development. For this an IT tool is being developed (INTEGRA) to support concurrent conceptual design using the Internet as a communication medium. The INTEGRA system is being implemented as an bintegratedQ environment, with multiple applications rolled into a single coherent system. Its software components are also illustrated in Fig. 2. It includes eight functional components: (1) user agent, (2) client briefing tool, (3) cost modelling tool, (4) constraints checking tool, (5) risk assessment tool, (6) sketching and drawing tool, (7) 3D visualisation tool, and (8) synchronous and asynchronous communication tool. The user agent resides in the user agent layer; client briefing, cost modelling, constraints checking, risk assessment, sketching and drawing, and 3D visualisation tool are distributed in the application tools layer. Synchronous and asynchronous communication is implemented in the communication layer. In the visualization component of the system, 2D sketches and drawings can be turned into 3D panoramic views using this tools. It uses the MGI Photovista software (MGI Software Corp 2000) within the Web browser. Fig. 1 shows the process from 2D sketches to 3D panorama.
Fig. 1. From 2D drawing to 3D panorama.
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This visualization tool is supported by sketching and drawing tools integrated within the main Web interface with the aid of legacy systems, here AEC professionals can draw sketches using four methods: freehand sketching, AutoDesk Architectural Desktop (ADT), AutoDesk AutoSketch, and Painter Classic software (Fig. 2). In addition, external hardware (e.g. WACOM Intuos Graphics Tablet System) is used to respond to user actions. The Intuos Graphics Tablet System consists of two elements: a graphics tablet serves as drawing work area, and the Intuos tool such as Intuos pen is a pressure-sensitive freehand device for image editing and creating. The WACOM control panel is designed to be customized and keep track of Intuos tools setting. Different tool settings can be customized for different applications. The INTEGRA system allows for 3D models to be generated at different stages of the conceptual design process using tools and methods appropriate for each stage. 3.2. Visualisation in the house building sector In this project the potential of visualization and VR in the house building sector of the construction industry was explored. The house building industry
is standardised to an extent common in the manufacturing industries and the number of standard house types used by any particular housing developer is relatively low. The housing developer involved in this project used fifteen basic layouts, with variations to the facade and detailing bringing the total number up of house types to about forty. AutoCAD data relating to a standard house type was obtained from the housing developer, and a virtual model of that house type was then created. VR is being widely tried within the construction industry for design applications, for collaborative visualisation and as a tool to improve construction processes [21] but it is currently implemented in an ad hoc fashion [22]. This project investigated the effective implementation of PC-based VR systems in the industry. A number of VR systems, including Superscape, VRML and World Tool Kit, have been tested to assess their suitability for integrated use in the house building sector of the construction industry. Although it is already possible to create virtual reality models from within VR packages, for the use of VR in construction industry, the transfer of geometrical data between CAD and VR is desirable to avoid repetitive work [23]. The trials undertaken by the
Fig. 2. Sketching and drawing tool.
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authors have posed the question of how to transfer data from traditional CAD systems into VR, and have also assessed the suitability of different approaches to the creation of VR models for different situations. The potential usefulness of VR packages for industrial and business applications is limited by their incapacity to support manipulation of specialist information. They have inadequate facilities for both internal information management and data exchange with other packages [2]. Within building design tools, construction industry data is ordered in a complex and domain specific manner. Support is required for this information in VR, but the generic nature of VR packages cannot retain the complex semantics and syntax of such industrial information. The utility of VR for consensus building between different parties within the iterative process of building design and visualization cannot be realised without adequate information management. Experimentation was undertaken to ascertain an effective method that housing developers could use to create and optimise VR models. The ability to use VR to rapidly create and evaluate proposed developments, in order to assess the appropriate usage of different house types was seen as important. It was agreed that a library of these standard house types, with their associated levels of detail and optimisations could potentially be built up. The advantage of this approach is that the speed with which a mock up street layout of any prospective site could be produced is much greater, once the library has been created. Three different models of a housing scheme have been produced, using different modelling techniques.
Fig. 3. VR model showing a standard house type.
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Fig. 4. Screen shot of a VR model of the standard house type in a browser.
The first model was built in the commercial VR package Superscape (Fig. 3), and consists of one house type in different positions in the street layout. The second was built from CAD data of the house type translated into the Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML) and assembled in an authoring tool (Fig. 4). The third model was built in 3D in the AutoCAD environment and then exported to 3D Studio VIZ, where it was structured hierarchically and further edited before being translated into VRML (Fig. 5). The VRML site model (Fig. 5) is not as refined as the initial house type models, and just shows the general layout of the site. The type of modeling technique is usually dictated by the level of
Fig. 5. The VR Model shown in a web-browser, information about different house types can be linked to the model, and animations can also be shown.
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detail required, the first one being suitable for single house types for walk-through purposes, while the second and third techniques are used to show street layouts and hence requiring less detail on the individual house models. However these models demonstrate the potential for the project to be accessed through a browser, (Fig. 5) either remotely, or on the local computer. In such a distributed use, bandwidth considerations lead to the necessity to seek a compromise between model detail and speed of navigation within the model. Technical data or photographic marketing images can also be displayed when the user enquires about relevant parts of the housing scheme from within the virtual environment using hotspots. Consultation with housing developers identified a number of areas where VR could potentially achieve benefits, these include: marketing to show finished development to prospective buyers, planning consultations to facilitate the process of obtaining planning consents, and finally design development especially for site layouts (Fig. 6). 3.3. Towards visualisation support for site-level operations The aim of this project was to develop a visualisation and communication environment (VISCON) that would assist design teams in communicating and visualising design details that may be problematic to construction teams. The prototype system is Web-based to facilitate use by geographically distributed project teams. This enables all the participants in design and construction of a project to access the project drawings, illustra-
tions and documents from anywhere inside the office or on site. AutoCAD, Architectural Desk Top, 3D studio, and VRML have been used for the development of the prototype system. Using the VISCON system, the user can manipulate and display any design or graphical information from any location with internet access. The VISCON architecture has been developed to make use of existing visualization tools to clarify and communicate buildability information (Fig. 7). The architecture forms a closed and interactive loop that includes designers, the system, and the site team. The data flow, which is represented by an arrow, depicts the fact that data moves from one process to another. The prototype system architecture helps the design team to choose which type of visualisation is appropriate for which part of the building with potential difficulties on site. The VISCON system consists of three main layers. The first layer of the VISCON system is where the 3D models are created from the 2D drawings and textual information using a 3D CAD modelling tools. Each 3D object can be created using one or more 3D modeling techniques such as solid modelling or wire frame techniques. When creating 3D models, each method has its own advantages and disadvantages. It is necessary to identify at the outset the best method to use for a specific component of a building or for the building as a whole. The decision on what type of visualization should be produced depends on the information to be presented. It also depends on the particular project and its constraints as well as on the way of working. If the visualization aim is, for example, to show how components can be assembled, the best visualization method to use is 3-D animation.
Fig. 6. VR Model assembled in a Generic VR Tool, using CAD house type data, and site layout data.
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Fig. 7. VISCON system architecture.
Fig. 8. VRML model for cladding showing the interface between different building components.
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To view the final product, it is best to use a VRML model, which can be manipulated and viewed from different angles and sides. Rendered images are useful for visualizing materials and their appearance. This enables users to decide on the best materials from an aesthetic point of view. VISCON also offers other visualization systems currently available (such as VR proprietary software) and is flexible enough to incorporate other systems that will be available in future. The models created within the system (see example in Fig. 8) can be linked to the main CAD drawing. Rendered drawings, 3D animations and VRML models can be hyperlinked to a 2-D plan of the proposed building or structure so that it can be viewed or downloaded. The second layer of the system consists of the communication infrastructure including site video links using tools such as NetMeeting, and collaborative support systems such as BSCW (Basic Support for Collaborative Working). The third layer or client layer provides external and remote access to the system.
4. Conclusions The paper presented a review of visualization applications in the AEC sector followed by three case study projects where various technologies have been applied to different stages of design and construction. This highlighted ways in which visualization can assist AEC professionals improve aspects of their work. During conceptual design visualization can help designers work collaboratively and communicate ideas more efficiently. In housing development, site layout models can be used as a marketing tool with clients or for planning consultations with planners, at the same time it can improve the way house type designs are developed by design teams. It has also been shown in the last case study that visualization can bridge the gap between designers and site teams in facilitating the exchange of information for buildability problems. Visualization applications are becoming more readily available and accessible to construction professionals due to the continuous decreasing cost of software and hardware. Some leading construction firms have invested large resour-
ces for the use of visualization in house realizing its business benefits. Some of these companies are using advanced tools for the creation of walkthrough models of new developments to communicate concepts to clients, or to check the integrity of designs in terms of clash detection between the services and the structure. Implementation problems of these new technologies have always been the main barrier in adopting them, however while in the past the main problem was cost, it is now more organizational and human issues that stand in the way of taking full advantage of the benefits that can be realized. This is now being seen as the next challenge in this area of research where both academics and practitioners are realizing that successful adoption of new technologies depends on careful consideration of organizational and business issues. References [1] S. Johnson, What’s in a representation, why do we care, and what does it mean? Examining evidence from psychology, Automation in Construction 8 (1) (1998) 5 – 24. [2] J. Whyte, N. Bouchlaghem, A. Thorpe, The promise and problems of implementing virtual reality in construction practice, Proceedings of CIB W78, The Life-cycle of Construction IT Innovations: Technology Transfer From Research To practice Stockholm, 3–5 June, 1998. [3] D. Kurmann, Sculptor—A Tool for Intuitive Architectural Design, in: M. Tan, R. Teh (Eds.), CAAD Futures ’95—The Global Design Studio, 1995, pp. 323 – 330, Singapore. [4] J.S. Nimeroff, E. Simoncelli, I. Badler, J. Dorsey, Rendering spaces for architectural environments, Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 4 (3) (1995) 286 – 297. [5] Y. Shinomiya, et al., Soundproof simulation in the living environment using virtual reality, Proceedings of the International Conference Virtual Reality Environments in Architecture and Design, Leeds, November 2–3, 1994. [6] M.J. Spearpoint, Virtual Reality Simulation of Fire in a Dwelling, New Horizons, BEPAC Seminar, Oxford, 1994. [7] M. Ormerod, G. Aouad, The need for matching visualisation techniques to client understanding in the UK construction industry, Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Visualisation IV’97, London, August 27–29, 1997, pp. 322 – 328. [8] T. Adeji-Kumi, A. Retik, A library-based 4D visualisation of construction processes, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Information Visualisation (IV’97) London, 27– 29 August, 1997. [9] A. Day, New tools for urban design, Urban Design Quarterly (1994 July) 20 – 23. [10] D. Campbell, J. Davidson, Community and Environmental Design and Simulation, Designing the Digital Space, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1997.
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