What's New in Terrain Tools

What's New in Terrain Tools

What's New in Terrain Tools 1.6

MVRsimulation VRSG real-time dense forest scene of Lugo, Spain, featuring the HH-60G entity with a Bambi Bucket (water bucket) in flight on a fire fighting mission.
MVRsimulation VRSG real-time scene of the lush forest and one of the many modeled bridges and twin tunnels along the A6 highway of virtual Lugo, Spain. This terrain was built with Terrain Tools version 1.6.
MVRsimulation VRSG real-time 3D littoral view of Costa Verde, Spain, simulating the ocean wave fall-off and transparency at the shoreline. In the absence of raster or vector source data for bathymetry, the bathymetry terrain surface depth is now computed by Terrain Tools for each terrain vertex as a function of the distance to the closest point on the coastline.
MVRsimulation VRSG real-time scene with instanced connected powerlines and streetlight light lobes on the Hajin, Syria, 3D terrain.
MVRsimulation VRSG real-time night scene featuring instanced streetlight light lobes and building models with emissive light-map textures on the Hajin, Syria, 3D terrain.
MVRsimulation VRSG real-time overview scene featuring an area of Hajin, Syria populated with buildings generated in Esri CityEngine.
MVRsimulation VRSG real-time scene of the approach to the modeled town of Pedrafita do Cebreiro in virtual Lugo province, Galicia, Spain.
MVRsimulation VRSG real-time scene featuring virtual Los Llanos Albacete Air Base (LEAB), Albacete province in central Spain.
MVRsimulation VRSG real-time scene featuring the result of creating a heavily forested area in Terrain Tools. Notice how the trees blend well with the terrain; the tree colors are sampled from the terrain imagery.
MVRsimulation VRSG real-time scene of one of the twin tunnels outside Pedrafita do Cebreiro along the A6 highway of virtual Lugo, Spain. 

MVRsimulation Terrain Tools for Esri® ArcGIS® version 1.6 contains the following new features and enhancements:

  • Ability to recompile an existing 3D terrain's cultural features (such as models, instances, lights, and fences) without having to recompile the terrain and textures.
  • New feature type for compiling extruded building features using an Esri CityEngine rule package (.rpk) to enable adding large areas of dense culture to 3D terrain quickly and easily. Many MVRsimulation customers already use CityEngine for generating large urban models for use on their 3D terrain datasets. This feature simplifies the workflow.
  • Colorization of tree models and other vegetation by automatic color matching of the models with underlying geospecific imagery. The result yields increased realism and suspension of disbelief to flight simulations.
  • The surface depth along a coastline is now computed as a function of the distance to the coastline. Bathymetry source data is no longer required to generate a bathymetry surface.
  • Unique compiled-in models in MVRsimulation’s HPX model format are no longer compiled as instanced geometry.
  • Full support of all node types in the HPX model format, such as external references and multi-texture geometry type.
  • Powerline and light lobe support for compiled-in instances via positioning attributes specified in a JSON file.
  • New tool to create a raster image from compiled terrain for cases where a heightmap is needed. Such cases include using the raster as input to CityEngine.
  • Improvement for rendering the transition between levels of detail (LODs). This new technique smooths LOD transitions while reducing the triangle count by over 20%.
  • Performance enhancements for large areas of instanced trees via LOD probability weights specified in a JSON file and support of the LOD_Scale feature attribute.
  • Performance and navigation improvements to the Build Manager interface.
  • Runway creation improvements to better support fitting multiple geometry layers within a runway model to the curvature of the earth and terrain profile.

Terrain Tools version 1.6 supports all the advancements in the latest ArcGIS for Desktop version 10.8.

MVRsimulation Terrain Tools and VRSG real-time textured and wireframe 3D views of the virtual Albacete Air Base, Spain. Also shown is the air base’s control tower model in Model Viewer.

Using Terrain Tools version 1.6, MVRsimulation has built a high-resolution 3D terrain dataset of Spain, which is available to customers with active software maintenance. This geospecific round-earth terrain was built with 0.50 mpp resolution source imagery and SRTM1 (30m) elevation source data covering the entire country, and bathymetry data of the northern/western Spain coastline. This new terrain includes areas of high-resolution insets of Lugo province in the Galicia region of northwest Spain and Los Llanos Albacete Air Base (LEAB) in Albacete province in central Spain.

How to obtain Terrain Tools

Current Terrain Tools customers on active maintenance can obtain the latest release of Terrain Tools version 1.6 by downloading the software from their account on MVRsimulation's Download Server. Terrain Tools version 1.6 is also delivered on a USB hard drive. Contact MVRsimulation for further information.

Note: Terrain built with the latest features of Terrain Tools version 1.6 requires the latest release of VRSG 6.4 or higher. Customers with a VRSG license and valid software maintenance can also obtain the latest release of VRSG on MVRsimulation's Download Server.