Grant: Applied Research and Development Grants - Level 1

The research in this proposal seeks to implement a novel approach to 3D building model construction thatallows rapid assessment of roof damage for insurance purposes in the aftermath of natural disasters.The 3D modelling process, is fundamentally important in urban planning and related domains that draw uponthe content of 3D models of urban scenes. Such models can be used to visualize city images and multiplescales from individual buildings to entire cities prior to and after change has occurred. While this ability is ofgreat importance in day-to-day work and special projects undertaken by planners, geo-designers, and architects,it is also of great value to the global property insurance and reinsurance industries for rapid assessment ofdamage to insured properties in the aftermath of natural disasters such as tornados and hurricanes. While theentirety of an insured property is at risk, it is also important to be able to undertake rapid assessment of roofingin particular. In this context, the area of each roof panel and pitch must be rapidly assessed to comprise a wholeroof report for each residence. To undertake these calculations with any degree of accuracy using manualmethods, considerable time and labour is required. The 3D building models automatically generated in thisresearch can be utilized for estimating the complex geometries of any form of roof layout. Procedural modelingis used in this case to create the 3D models from sets of rules. The research project has drawn upon earlierwork by Müller et al., who created a model of suburban residences in Beverly Hills using shape grammars.They imported data from a GIS database to classify imported mass models as basic shapes in their shapevocabulary. If this was not possible, they used a general extruded building footprint together with a general roofobtained by the straight computational skeleton defined by a continuous shrinking process. However, in manyresidential areas, there are roof types that the straight skeleton method cannot create, since roofs created by thismethod are limited to those with ridges parallel to nearby long edges of the building contour.