Real-Time Rendering of large Building Information Models

With the use of Building Information Models (BIM), realtime3D visualizations have become a natural tool in order tocommunicate ideas and share information between all involved partiesin a project. Currently, several different BIM viewers are available forthe purpose of interactive presentations and design reviews. However,as BIMs become larger and more detailed, it provides a challenge foravailable software solutions to manage them interactively. In thispaper we present our findings from analyzing three commonly usedBIM viewers - Tekla BIMSight, Autodesk Navisworks and SolibriModel Viewer - in terms of real-time rendering performance. Inaddition we have developed a prototype BIM viewer to test modernapproaches for efficient real-time rendering. Specifically, we haveimplemented the latest version of the Coherent Hierarchical Cullingalgorithm. Our results show that existing BIM viewers all sharelimitations in their ability to handle large and complex BIMsinteractively. However, for the same test models, our prototype BIMviewer enables smooth real-time performance with no visual artifacts.The results from our tests thus shows that the technology to enablecorrect real-time rendering of large and complex BIMs is alreadyaccessible, but are currently not utilized by any of the tested BIMviewers