ISPRS-Annals ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences ISPRS-Annals ISPRS Ann. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci. 2194-9050 Copernicus Publications Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/isprs-annals-IV-4-W4-161-2017 3D MODELLING AND VISUALIZATION BASED ON THE UNITY GAME ENGINE – ADVANTAGES AND CHALLENGES Buyuksalih I. 1 Bayburt S. 1 Buyuksalih G. 1 Baskaraca A. P. 1 Karim H. 2 Rahman A. A. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5263-8266 2 Bogazici Insaat Musavirlik A.S., Eski TUYAP Binasi No. 50 Beyoglu, Istanbul, Turkey 3D GIS Research Group, Faculty of Geoinformation and Real Estate, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81310, Johor Bahru, Johor, Malaysia 13 11 2017 IV-4/W4 161 166 Copyright: © 2017 I. Buyuksalih et al. 2017 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article is available from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/IV-4-W4/161/2017/isprs-annals-IV-4-W4-161-2017.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/IV-4-W4/161/2017/isprs-annals-IV-4-W4-161-2017.pdf

3D City modelling is increasingly popular and becoming valuable tools in managing big cities. Urban and energy planning, landscape, noise-sewage modelling, underground mapping and navigation are among the applications/fields which really depend on 3D modelling for their effectiveness operations. Several research areas and implementation projects had been carried out to provide the most reliable 3D data format for sharing and functionalities as well as visualization platform and analysis. For instance, BIMTAS company has recently completed a project to estimate potential solar energy on 3D buildings for the whole Istanbul and now focussing on 3D utility underground mapping for a pilot case study. The research and implementation standard on 3D City Model domain (3D data sharing and visualization schema) is based on CityGML schema version 2.0. However, there are some limitations and issues in implementation phase for large dataset. Most of the limitations were due to the visualization, database integration and analysis platform (Unity3D game engine) as highlighted in this paper.