A procedural approach to creating second empire houses

Abstract

In this work, we present a procedural approach to capture a variety of appearances of American Second Empire houses. To develop this procedural approach, we have identified the set of rules and similarities of Second Empire houses. Our procedural approach, therefore, captures the style differences of Second Empire houses with a relatively few numbers of parameters. Using our interface, we are able to generate virtual houses in a wide variety of styles of American Second Empire architecture. We have also developed a method to break up these virtual models into slices in order to efficiently and economically 3D print them. Using this approach we have created miniatures of two landmark buildings: the Hamilton-Turner Inn in Savannah and the Enoch Pratt House in Baltimore. Note that the virtual models still provide more details because of the limited resolution of 3D printing processes.