Real-time visualization of building information models (BIM)

•Providing accurate real-time visualizations of BIMs is a challenging task.•Many existing BIM viewers share performance problems for large BIMs.•Development and evaluation of an efficient prototype BIM viewer.•Occlusion culling is suitable for visualizing large and complex BIMs in real-time.

This paper highlights and addresses the complexity and challenges involved in visualizing large and detailed Building Information Models (BIM) in real-time. The contribution of the paper is twofold: (a) an in-depth analysis of four commonly used BIM viewers in terms of real-time rendering performance and (b) the development and validation of a prototype BIM viewer specifically designed to allow real-time visualization of large and complex building models. Regarding existing BIM viewers our results show that they all share limitations in their ability to handle large BIMs taken from real-world projects interactively. However, for the same test models our prototype BIM viewer is able to provide smooth real-time performance without sacrificing visual accuracy. By taking advantage of an efficient visibility determination algorithm, our prototype viewer restricts rendering efforts to visible objects only, with a significant performance increase compared to existing BIM viewers as a result.