Interactive Pailou Modeling

Pailous are representative Chinese architectures used to express commemoration, but their geometric structures and semantic construction rules are too complex to fast and intuitively model them with traditional modeling tools. Therefore, this work proposes an intuitive modeling system for stylized creation and manipulation for novices. Our system encapsulates their structural components as icons and semantic layouts as topological graphs while users can create and manipulate icons with topological recommendations. Our interpreter can automatically and immediately transform a graph to its corresponding model with provided components using our parametric L-system grammars derived from architectural rules. While using it to imitate existing representative Pailous and design imagined ones, the constructed results can achieve desired visual complexities. When comparing to an existing 3D model tool, Maya, in modeling a Pailou and Toukung, our system is effective and simple without requiring remembering and understanding those complex rules.