________CIPA 2005 XX International Symposium, 26 September – 01 October, 2005, Torino, Italy________ APPLYING NURBS MODELING TO RECONSTRUCTION OF A GOTHIC-FLEMISH FACADE K. Brukamp FH Bielefeld, University of Applied Sciences Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering Artilleriestr. 9, D-32427 Minden, Germany - E-Mail:
[email protected] KEY WORDS: CAD, Photo-realism, Virtual Reality, Visualization ABSTRACT The city hall of the municipal town Wesel, located on the river Rhine, was built in the middle of the 15th century and was destroyed during the Second World War. Future generations will owe extraordinary gratitude to the citizens of Wesel, their activism and hard work of many years, for the fact that this late Gothic building will be reconstructed as the first of its kind in Germany. Only a few pictures and maps of the city hall could be retrieved during the past years. Under this circumstances, comparable buildings had to be examined to obtain geometric dimensions for the reconstruction process. Therefore, site visits to cathedral huts and stonemasons were helpful and instructive. After this, the different normal stones, cuboids, profile stones, and consoles could be reconstructed. These stones were compiled in a stone catalogue. For the production of this hierarchically structured stone catalogue, suitable CAD modeling procedures were developed. Characteristics were then applied to facade construction. Well-known standard methods of solid modeling, like extrusion and tessellation, were employed and extended by NURBS modeling methods. The NURBS (Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines) geometry is a mathematical representation of each shape of geometrical elements. Simple lines, circles, and surfaces can be represented, as well as complex 3D free form surfaces or solids.