Institute for Creative Technologies

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BACKGROUND
Military terrain data comes in different forms (e.g. LIDAR, DTED, Hyper-Spectral etc.), different sources and is collected by different agencies. As a result not all information can be deciphered, and some information may be missing outright. Therefore, the unified datasets are disparate, sparse, un-textured and lack the qualities to be effectively utilized within today’s game technologies. Thus, there exists a need to optimize, improve, texture and enhance these datasets. Leading AAA titles take around 5 years and 50 million dollars to produce, typically allocating 70% of their budget and resources towards creating virtual environments. Military terrain needs are different, as the ability to quickly produce these environments in a cost-efficient manner is paramount. In conjunction with the US Army Simulation and Training Technology Center (STTC), the University Of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies (USC ICT) has created the Military Terrain for Games Pipeline, which addresses these issues. It reduces the time and artist effort required to generate game-playable datasets by developing tools that automate typical processes employing procedural methods. The MTGP analyzes the military terrain data for un-optimized geometry, quality of textures and their mapping, duplicate edges and vertices. Any existing problems are fixed, and this optimized data is fed into the MTGP pipeline, where it goes through a number of processes.

AUGMENTATION

• Clutter Engine: The MTGP clutter engine augments geo-typical data to existing geo-specific military terrain data. Multiple object placement techniques are used to place objects (trees, street lights, power posts, cars) along or around terrain features (buildings, rivers, roads, canals). Objects can be clustered or placed individually in a random or deterministic way.
• Environment Packages: The MTGP environment packages module parameterizes the augmentation process. It provides tools to generate and configure geo-typical libraries for different areas of interest. Users can specify the regional characteristics for an area of interest (e.g. location, climate, culture, language) and the module will automatically generate an environment library for that region. Users can also provide placement instructions to control the number, density and type of objects. Thus, the MTGP stands capable of generating a variety of datasets representative of virtually any area of interest.

PROCEDURAL TEXTURING
Most input datasets generally contain only geometry information, while some may contain rudimentary textures. The MTGP pipeline improves upon the dataset, procedurally applying geo-typical textures (dirt or asphalt, brick or stone sand, grass or concrete) to incoming geometry (roads, buildings and terrain).

Geo-specific research: Often single shot images from patrolling, reconnaissance media are available. These provide a rich source of geo-specific texturing information as opposed to the geo-typical textures the MTGP currently applies procedurally. Research was conducted to procedurally apply geo-tagged (using GPS camera to map coordinates) images to 3D models, thus, breaking into the realm of procedurally applying geo-specific textures to geo-specific scenes. Research has shown this method works well for ideal images (high resolution, un-occluded, clear background), but currently requires significant more manual intervention.

GAME ENGINE SUPPORT
The ultimate goal of the MTGP is to generate game-ready datasets for game engines. Each target engine has its own requirements. Some, like Gamebryo, offer guidelines for scene creation with ready-made exporters, while others like VBS2, require several steps of pre-processing and conversion to their supported formats. The MTGP also supports exporting to COLLADA with information required for correlation in OneSAF. In the past, the MTGP has supported importing open flight data and exporting to Source, Delta3D and Unreal game engines.

CONCLUSION
The MTGP can rapidly and procedurally enhance and convert military terrain data into game-ready virtual environments. The push button pipeline has several components, such as the Clutter Engine, Environment Packages generation and configuration tools, and exporters for VBS2, Gamebryo and COLLADA that can be individually employed by artists, training developers and instructors to cut down production time and effort.

Tags: games, military, pipeline, real-time rendering, terrain, virtual environments

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