| Abstract: | This paper reports on three-dimensional reconstruction of the Yaolin Cave in the Karst Region of Zhejiang, China. An object-oriented method was used to represent two cave classes—the class Boundary and the class Inside. The class Boundary included objects of the cave ceiling and the cave floor which are part of the topographical trend of the cave. This trend was determined by integrating topography with landform using TIN modeling. The inside of the cave with stalagmites, stalactites, dripstone-columns, and other objects was built using surveying data, photographs, and such computer graphics techniques as texture mapping and transparency. A stand-alone, 3-D visualization system—Cave3D—was developed on the Windows 98/NT platform to produce 3-D graphics and implement graphics-based computation, spatial query, and analyses. A virtual Yaolin cave was created using VRML97 and Java and posted on the Web. |
