MULTIOBJECT VISUALIZATION OF VAST FORESTS IN VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT SYSTEMS

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.