Designing a Large-Scale Immersive Visit in Architecture, Engineering, and Construction

Abstract

Throughout history, tools for engineering in the building industry have evolved. Due to the arrival of Industry 4.0, Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Building Information Modeling (BIM) software have replaced the usage of pens, pencils, and paper in the design process. This paper describes the work required to design a large-scale immersive visit of a district under construction in a suburban area of Greater Paris, France. As part of this real estate project, called LaVallée, we have access to its city information model: all the BIMs of the works to be carried out including roads, terrain, street furniture, fountains, and landscaping. This paper describes all the technical operations necessary for the design of an immersive 3D model with a high level of detail of the neighborhood with its surroundings. The objective of this technical report was to provide practitioners with feedback on such an achievement based on industrial-level data. The development of the city model begins with the registration of all the BIMs from different firms in a common Geographic Information System: this gives the opportunity to confront the operational requirement of a construction phase and the actual current practice of architecture firms. A first prototype was developed using the archviz tool TwinMotion. In order to increase the realism of the model, we describe the creation of a pipeline in Unreal Engine with the automated tasks of material and mesh replacement and the lighting and landscape configuration. The main contribution of this work is to give relevant experience on building such a large-scale model, with the Python script when possible, as well as the necessary manual steps. It is a valuable contribution to the making of large-scale immersive visits with a high level of detail and their requirements.