Modeling High-Quality and Game-Like Virtual Space of a Court Noble House by Using 3D Game Engine

In recent years, application of virtual-reality technology to simulate historical architectures is becoming popular. The biggest advantage of the virtual-reality technology is man-machine interaction. However, the man-machine interaction requires high computing costs to realize simultaneous execution of processing user commands and rendering a 3D scene. Therefore, we are often forced either to simplify a 3D model or to give up high-level user interfaces. This paper proposes to adopt a next-generation 3D game engine to create and render historical architectural houses. We apply this strategy to a famous Court Noble House "Reizei-ke" in Kyoto. We realized its high-quality 3D CG rendering, real-time weather and environment simulation, and game-like man-machine interaction.