Calhoun: The NPS Institutional Archive Theses and Dissertations Thesis Collection 2005-09 Generating enhanced natural environments and terrain for interactive combat simulations (GENETICS) Wells, William D. Monterey, California. Naval Postgraduate School http://hdl.handle.net/10945/10052 NAVAL POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL MONTEREY, CALIFORNIA DISSERTATION GENERATING ENHANCED NATURAL ENVIRONMENTS AND TERRAIN FOR INTERACTIVE COMBAT SIMULATIONS (GENETICS) by William David Wells September 2005 Dissertation Supervisor: Rudolph Darken Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK REPORT DOCUMENTATION PAGE Form Approved OMB No. 0704-0188 Public reporting burden for this collection of information is estimated to average 1 hour per response, including the time for reviewing instruction, searching existing data sources, gathering and maintaining the data needed, and completing and reviewing the collection of information. Send comments regarding this burden estimate or any other aspect of this collection of information, including suggestions for reducing this burden, to Washington headquarters Services, Directorate for Information Operations and Reports, 1215 Jefferson Davis Highway, Suite 1204, Arlington, VA 22202-4302, and to the Office of Management and Budget, Paperwork Reduction Project (0704-0188) Washington DC 20503. 1. AGENCY USE ONLY 2. REPORT DATE 3. REPORT TYPE AND DATES COVERED September 2005 Doctoral Dissertation 4. TITLE AND SUBTITLE: 5. FUNDING NUMBERS Generating Enhanced Natural Environments and Terrain for Interactive Combat Simulations (GENETICS) 6. AUTHOR(S) William David Wells 7. PERFORMING ORGANIZATION NAME(S) AND ADDRESS(ES) 8. PERFORMING Naval Postgraduate School ORGANIZATION REPORT Monterey, CA 93943-5000 NUMBER 9. SPONSORING / MONITORING AGENCY NAME(S) AND ADDRESS(ES) 10. SPONSORING / MONITORING N/A AGENCY REPORT NUMBER 11. SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES The views expressed in this dissertation are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government. 12a. DISTRIBUTION / AVAILABILITY STATEMENT 12b. DISTRIBUTION CODE Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited 13. ABSTRACT Virtual battlefields devoid of vegetation deprive soldiers of valuable training in the critical aspects of terrain tactics and terrain-based situational awareness, but creating realistic landscapes by hand is notoriously expensive; requiring both proprietary tools and trained artists, hampering rapid scenario generation and limiting reuse. GENETICS is a new object placement scheme where the arduous task of placing vegetation objects is reduced to finding readily-available source data and setting a few parameters. Our approach constructs large-scale natural environments at run-time using a procedural image-based algorithm without the need for skilled artists or proprietary tools. The resulting vegetation-laden terrain looks realistic, and the algorithm can be extended to incorporate a wide variety of environmental factors. GENETICS offers researchers the ability to quickly and easily build consistent large-scale synthetic natural environments to examine vegetation clutter requirements necessary to accomplish distributed mission training tasks. This dissertation presents and implements the GENETICS algorithm, compares it against other vegetation placement schemes, and outlines how simulationists can use GENETICS to quickly and cheaply build large-scale natural environments. It also touches upon level of detail algorithms, ecotype modeling and how GENETICS can be used to generate land cover data where none exists. 14. SUBJECT TERMS 15. NUMBER OF Terrain Visualization, Vegetation Placement, Virtual Landscapes, Synthetic Natural Environments, PAGES Real-time Simulation, Ecotype Modeling 169 16. PRICE CODE 17. SECURITY 18. SECURITY 19. SECURITY 20. LIMITATION CLASSIFICATION OF CLASSIFICATION OF THIS CLASSIFICATION OF OF ABSTRACT REPORT PAGE ABSTRACT Unclassified Unclassified Unclassified UL NSN 7540-01-280-5500 Standard Form 298 (Rev. 2-89) Prescribed by ANSI Std. 239-18 i THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK ii Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited GENERATING ENHANCED NATURAL ENVIRONMENTS AND TERRAIN FOR INTERACTIVE COMBAT SIMULATIONS (GENETICS) William D. Wells Major, United States Air Force B.A.E., Georgia Institute of Technology, 1991 M.S.C.S., Air Force Institute of Technology, 1996 Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN MODELING, VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS AND SIMULATION from the NAVAL POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL September 2005 Author: __________________________________________________ William D. Wells Approved by: ______________________ _______________________ Dr. Rudolph Darken Dr. Christian Darken Professor of Computer Science Professor of Computer Science Dissertation Supervisor ______________________ _______________________ Dr. Thomas Lucas Dr. Mathias Kölsch Professor of Operations Research Professor of Computer Science ______________________ _______________________ Dr. Wolfgang Baer COL (R) Jack Thorpe, Ph.D. Professor of Information Science Approved by: __________________________________________________ Dr. Rudolph P. Darken, Chair, MOVES Academic Committee Approved by: __________________________________________________ Julie Filizetti, Associate Provost for Academic Affairs iii THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK iv ABSTRACT Virtual battlefields devoid of vegetation deprive soldiers of valuable training in the critical aspects of terrain tactics and terrain-based situational awareness. Barren landscapes fail to provide trainees with necessary visual cues required to grasp the scale of their surroundings. Without the cover of vegetation, targets are easily visible from the air. Determining line of sight becomes simply a matter of sorting elevations. There is a need to introduce realistic vegetation into our simulators to improve training effectiveness while minimizing the expense typically incurred building such environments. GENETICS is a new image-based object placement scheme built within Delta3D, the open source simulation engine designed for military training. Using GENETICS, the arduous task of placing vegetation objects across large-scale virtual landscapes is reduced to finding readily-available source data and setting a few parameters. Vegetation-laden terrain is created at runtime without the need for skilled artists, proprietary tools, or playbox-limited databases. The resulting distribution looks realistic and this algorithm can be extended to incorporate a wide variety of environmental factors or to generate geotypical distributions of man-made landscape features. GENETICS offers researchers the ability to quickly and easily construct consistent large-scale synthetic natural environments to examine vegetation clutter requirements necessary to accomplish distributed mission training tasks. This dissertation presents and implements the GENETICS algorithm, compares it against other vegetation placement schemes, and outlines how simulationists can use GENETICS to quickly and cheaply build large-scale synthetic natural environments. It also touches upon level of detail algorithms, ecotype modeling, and how GENETICS can be used to generate land cover data where none exists. v THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK vi TABLE OF CONTENTS I. INTRODUCTION........................................................................................................1 A. MOTIVATION ................................................................................................1 B. THESIS STATEMENT...................................................................................3 C. PROBLEM STATEMENT .............................................................................4 D. APPROACH.....................................................................................................6 E. SCOPE ..............................................................................................................8 F. GOALS............................................................................................................10 G. CONTRIBUTIONS........................................................................................11 H. DISSERTATION OVERVIEW....................................................................13 II. REVIEW OF RELATED WORK............................................................................15 A. INTRODUCTION..........................................................................................15 B. CURRENT MILITARY SIMULATION SYSTEMS.................................15 C. TERRAIN VISUALIZATION SYSTEMS AND DATABASE ACCURACY ..................................................................................................16 D. VEGETATION DATASETS ........................................................................17 1. VMAP (Vector Map) .........................................................................18 2. LULC (Land Use/Land Cover).........................................................19 3. GeoTIFF..............................................................................................20 4. NLCD (National Land Cover Dataset) ............................................20 E. VEGETATION PLACEMENT WITHIN COMMERCIAL TOOLS ......21 F. MODELING PLANT DISTRIBUTIONS....................................................22 1. Semi-Automated Landscape Feature Extraction............................23 2. Ecotope Modeling...............................................................................24