High-Frequency Terrain Content and Surface Interactions for Off-Road Simulations

Standard visual database modeling practices in driving simulation reduce geometric complexity of terrain surfaces by using texture maps to simulate high frequency detail. Typically the vehicle dynamics model queries a correlated database that contains the polygons from the high level of detail of the visual database. However the vehicle dynamics database does not contain any of the high frequency information included in the texture maps. To overcome this issue and enhance both the visual and vehicle dynamics databases, a mathematical model of the high frequency content of the ground surface is developed using a set of Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS) patches. The patches are combined in the terrain query by superimposing them over the low-frequency polygonal terrain, reintroducing the missing content. The patches are also used to generate Bump Map textures for the image generator so that the visual representation matches the terrain query. An imagery-based approach to generating the mathematical surfaces and Bump Maps from the database's decal textures is also presented. Future research will include full implementation in a driving simulator. This research was supported by an SBIR Phase I Contract (No. W56HZV-04-C-0101) in conjunction with the U.S. Army TARDEC.