This paper describes a range of procedural techniques being developed to allow historic building styles to be modelled in a rapid manner, suitable for extremely fast rendering. We are expecting these tools to be used to model large-scale urban virtual-environments, from ancient Rome to modern day Hong Kong.When creating large scenes, there are two particular problems that we need to address and overcome. Firstly, the need to model scenes efficiently leads to a sense of repetition of the models as a small number of individual models is used repeatedly. We believe that it is now feasible to avoid the sense of repetition by using models drawn from a large library of prototypes according to some well-defined tools. By using procedural modelling we hope to speed up the model-building process while providing a number of other benefits.The other problem with large scenes comes with rendering them at an acceptable frame rate. By incorporating our modellers with the scenegraph being used to render them, a series of techniques and attributes may be applied to the models to cull out geometry not visible to the viewer, and to provide smoother transitions between varying levels of detail, avoiding artefacts such as geometry popping.As well as describing how the approach can be used in particular applications we describe the architecture and implementation of the modelling tools. Finally we show how the approach can be extended to other architectural styles and the working environment customised

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Reconstructing large areas of historic cities involves assembling a scene from a combination of knowledge of areas that no longer exist and known monuments that have survived and can still be (at least partially) observed and measured. In many cases little detail is known for such areas although it can be anticipated that buildings in some specific generic styles would be typical of the time and place. At UEA considerable effort has been put into creating a Scene Assembler package for the CHARISMATIC project which brings together individually designed objects from detailed modelling packages such as 3DStudioMax and combines these with other more generic building prototypes. These objects are then laid out using a number of extremely powerful and user friendly operations within a landscape and sky dome. This process makes it easy and quick to put together a complete city scene, which is accurate enough, historically, to give a feel for what the area would have been like. The models constructed using the tools are intended to be used as backdrops for reconstructing historic populated events. This paper describes the stages in defining such models and the various tools available to speed up the process