Title: Rendering a 3D-city

Authors: Otto Nordgren and Yuri Stange

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to look at the possibilities to render a three dimensional replica of an area based on coordinates taken from a LIDAR map. Given x, y, z coordinates, we want to find out if the rendered world is usable as a map reference for real life scenarios and if you can include landmarks based on locations taken from the OpenStreetMap. We will try to determine if this method is usable on urban areas such as the KTH Campus. We will also try to evaluate how well this method scales with larger maps and what kind of resolution that is needed on the LIDAR map. Using an open source program called Blender we were able to import the coordinates and render a three dimensional world. There was a lot of work that needed to be done with the data, such as removing doublets and false information before the import. We concluded that this technique heavily depends on the quality of the data and it's not the optimal choice to use when rendering urban areas. However we think that this method could prove very useful when rendering less detailed areas such as open fields with soft contours. There was a problem with scalability in Blender that forced us to use a smaller version of the map. Areas such as the KTH Campus or smaller towns contains a lot of information that needs to be rendered. This can be solved by programmatically loading the data as the user moves around the map.