Environment generation from satellite imagery
Manifold Analytics performs geo-spatial analytics and machine vision using satellite and aerial imagery. They use this data to gather valuable insights for their clients in defense, energy, and rail.
Client
Manifold Analytics / U.S. DoD
Year
2020
Manifold reached out to me to express interest in leveraging Unreal Engine 4 to generate visually plausible real time environments from existing satellite data. With my background in both photorealistic rendering for film and real-time video game rendering, this sounded like a great idea.
Heightfield Erosion
Geometry derived from a digital surface model
Starting with a 30×30 kilometer digital surface model provided by Manifold, we brought the data into SideFX Houdini. The raw data gave us accurate elevation and landmass, but the overall resolution was still rather coarse. To create some visual interest and fine detail we applied an erosion simulation. This simulation calculates the flow of sediment over time and provided some nice visual interest and a starting point for creating detail masks.
Geometry derived from a digital surface model
Heightfield erosion simulation (20 frames)
Infrared and blackbody visualizations representing combined erosion and elevation data
INSTANCE SCATTER
Manifold specializes in creating sophisticated AI driven terrain classifying algorithms. This means they can extract probabilistic masks representing various terrain types from satellite imagery. These masks can then be utilized to scatter points randomly throughout the scene, representing locations to which we can add trees later in Unreal.
HOUDINI ENGINE FOR UNREAL
To get our data into Unreal we opted to use the Houdini Engine plugin for Unreal. Houdini Engine is a great tool as it allows us to build complex setups in Houdini and import them directly into other packages.
Using Houdini Engine we were able to replace all of our template points with the appropriate models, and use our masks natively with the Unreal landscape layering system.
Base color texture maps visualized in Unreal Engine
Material layers visualized in Unreal Engine
CONCLUSION
This was one of my first projects seriously using Unreal. Although it would be a few years until I completely made the switch, looking back on it this was a pivotal project.