An efficient cutting scheme for a section view of the large‐scale infrastructure models

Abstract With the advancement of the three‐dimensional (3D) modeling techniques in the recent decade, civil infrastructure design (CID) has been used to produce large‐scale 3D infrastructure models that contain a large set of 3D models with a significantly large number of vertices. In the meantime, such large‐scale data necessitates a higher requirement for efficient data processing techniques. Two‐dimensional (2D)‐plane cutting is one of the basic techniques used to observe and analyze 3D models in CID. This paper presents an efficient cutting scheme for a section view of large‐scale 3D infrastructure models in CID. The proposed cutting scheme contains a pipeline of locating the intersected faces, computing the intersection points, and the polygon triangulation for visualization. Furthermore, an optimized data structure is introduced to realize the parallel implementation of the efficiency cutting scheme. After integrating to our existing 3D design and visualization platform, the experimental results with different 3D infrastructure model datasets, such as the large‐scale electrical substation models, have demonstrated both the effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposed cutting scheme.