Runtime environments commonly use “sleight-of-hand” techniques to approximate destruction and convince a user that their actions have deformed or destroyed an object. These “sleight-of-hand” processes rely on hand-creating general-use “pre-shattered” objects that may not accurately reflect the effects of every explosion, given the possible variations in radius and force. In a simulation, munitions must deform and fragment the environment believably in order to provide analysis and visual feedback to the users. At I/ITSEC 2019, the authors explored methodologies for increasing the number of autonomous entities within a simulation using existing game industry solutions. For this work, the authors have utilized a similar approach to mesh deformation by exploring the commercial game industry and attempting to capitalize on existing methods, while taking into account the necessity for removing the human-in-the-loop required by those techniques. With the global coverage of environment meshes expected to be used in the Synthetic Training Environment (STE), it would be too time consuming to create each mesh's destroyed variants by hand. In order to overcome this challenge, we have explored a method of using precomputed Voronoi diagrams to deform and fragment 3D meshes in real-time while maintaining performant simulation speed and fidelity. This method allows destruction to be customized to specific scales and positions on a given mesh based on the type and location of an ordnance. Utilizing additional research presented at I/ITSEC 2019 for creating simulation terrain (Chen et al. 2019) the workflow takes into account semantic classification enabling the system to deform ground meshes into craters and support attributed material types (e.g. concrete, wood) for object mesh fragmentation. With this research, we can bypass a lengthy process of manually preparing destruction meshes while also having a destruction system decoupled from mesh generation; both systems can be independently updated without requiring modification of the other.
Simulation
Methodology to Utilize Pre-Computed Voronoi Diagrams to Enable Dynamic Deformation and Destructibility of Environmental Meshes Within A Simulation Environment
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