Multiobject visualization of vast forests in virtual environment systems

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Abstract

This paper discusses the task of rendering vast woodlands in virtual environment systems using point clouds and hardware-accelerated ray tracing. A new approach is proposed, which represents the forest area as a multiobject comprising point cloud of a reference tree and a set of distinctive features of its instances. A developed method for deploying such a multiobject into a virtual forest on the ray tracing pipeline is described, which includes constructing bounding boxes of the reference tree, specifying geometric and color transformations for tree instances, and synthesizing images of these instances. Based on the proposed method, a software implementation (C++, GLSL, Vulkan) was created and tested on a number of detailed point clouds of real trees (deciduous and evergreen). The results of the testing confirmed the possibility to synthesize images of unique vast woodlands (of several million trees) in real time both from a bird's-eye view and from a pedestrian's point of view. The proposed solution has a wide range of applications: virtual environment systems, video simulators, scientific visualization, geoinformation systems, educational applications, etc.

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About the authors

P. Y. Timokhin

Scientific Research Institute for System Analysis of the National Research Centre “Kurchatov Institute”

Author for correspondence.
Email: p_tim@bk.ru
ORCID iD: 0000-0002-0718-1436
Russian Federation, 117218 Moscow, Nakhimovskii pr. 36/1

M. V. Mikhaylyuk

Scientific Research Institute for System Analysis of the National Research Centre “Kurchatov Institute”

Email: mix@niisi.ras.ru
ORCID iD: 0000-0002-7793-080X
Russian Federation, 117218 Moscow, Nakhimovskii pr. 36/1

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Supplementary files

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2. Fig. 1. Deploying a multi-object into a virtual forest.

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3. Fig. 2. AABB description of the sample tree.

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4. Fig. 3. Transformation of a sample tree instance.

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5. Fig. 4. Selection of AABBs: (a) AABB_1 failed external selection (ray r did not hit AABB_1); (b) AABB_2 failed internal selection (ray r did not hit any of the spheres); (c) AABB_3 passed internal selection (ray r hit a sphere).

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6. Fig. 5. Graphs of the dependence of the average time t of forest image synthesis on the height h of the observer for variants No. 1–3 of the arrangements from Table 2. On the left – for a forest based on deciduous tree sample No. 1 (from Table 1), on the right – based on evergreen tree sample No. 3. The scale of the h axis is logarithmic.

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7. Fig. 6. Examples of frames of visualization of virtual forest areas using our solution: on the left – view from the “pedestrian’s point of view”, on the right – view from the “bird’s eye view”. The size of all forest areas is 2000×2000 trees. Autumn forest (a) and (b) is created based on deciduous tree sample #1 from Table 1 with “strong” color correction (see Table 3). Forest areas (c), (d) and (e), (e) are created based on evergreen trees samples #2 and #3 with “weak” color correction.

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