Temporal evolution of ancient buildings

Nowadays, the improvement of computer skills and technology in Computer Graphics have benefited fields such as Cultural Heritage, where the main efforts have focused on the digital preservation of historic buildings or urban structures. In the state of the art, we have detected a lack of techniques based on procedural models of historical buildings combined with structural analysis, which would allow us to understand how a building was designed or why it was conceived in a certain way. In this thesis we have developed a technique to procedurally model ancient stone buildings combined with structural simulation and we have demonstrated its viability based on non-specialized tools designed for cultural heritage users. On the other hand, some historical events involving natural phenomena, such as volcanoes or earthquakes, determined the evolution of a civilization or a city in which a large part of its urban infrastructure was affected. In the current state of the art on cultural heritage, we have seen that the presence of studies on the reproduction of this type of events to help users in their research is testimonial. For this purpose, in this thesis we present a low-cost tool designed for users not expert in geology, such as cultural heritage professionals, that allows the reproduction of an earthquake on old stone buildings. Although Virtual Reality has become suitable for the diffusion of historical past events or the recreation of ancient buildings in Cultural Heritage, we have to say that the cost of the most immersive virtual reality devices is still expensive. Thus, in this thesis we have also designed a virtual reality pipeline compatible with low-cost smart-phones where the combination of structural and seismic simulation over ancient buildings is available for any kind of users.