A Study On The Method Of 3D Visualization Of Buildings' Earthquake Damage Based On ArcGIS And 3DS Max

Earthquakes are one of the most serious natural disasters people have to face. Our country is a place of the world where major earthquakes frequently occur. So how to effectively reduce huge losses of economy and casualties caused by earthquakes is a problem that challenges earthquake sciences. With the development of GIS technology, a lot of earthquake disaster prediction systems based on GIS have been available, providing good support for prediction of seismic hazards. Because of the limit of technology when it was developed, the results of the most earthquake disaster prediction systems are displayed by tablets, histograms, and charts etc. which cannot display detailed characteristics of building damage. With the development of Virtual Reality and simulation, there have been a great number of successful examples of using VR and simulation in disaster prevention and mitigation. It is, however, little reported on the research of the visualization of building damage by earthquakes. So, this thesis focuses on how to implement the visualization of buildings damage by earthquakes and to make it combined with the mainstream GIS software.Firstly, this thesis introduces the basic concepts, characteristics and current situations of the VR technology, the simulation technology and GIS technology, and uses many examples to illustrate their applications in the field of seismic research. According to the analysis of these examples, it is proposed to use the mainstream GIS software- ArcGIS9.0 and the mainstream 3D softwar-3dS Max to implement the 3D visualization of building damage by earthquakes. Then through the analysis of the standard of building damage levels and the characteristics of house damage by earthquakes, the classic characteristics of house damage by earthquakes are summarized, which lay the groundwork for making the models of house damage by earthquakes. Through a detailed discussion on the method of modeling, material and maps in 3DS Max, it is found what is the suitable method of modeling the building damage and the composite method between the building textures and the characteristics of building damage, which can reproduce the damage to the largest extent. That is using primitive geometry modeling, 2-D shapes modeling, compound...