Physically realistic camouflage net models for visualization and signature generation
Jody S. Loyd, Jeffrey S. Sanders · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2001
The Virtual Targets Center (VTC) is a strategic alliance between the Targets Management Office within the US Army Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation Command (STRICOM) and the Systems Simulation and Development Directorate within the US Army Aviation and Missile Command (AMCOM). This center reduces duplication of effort by making DoD owned geometry models available for reutilization and supports the modeling and simulation community by redistributing or creating geometry models in formats applicable to a wide range of simulation activities. In addition to these activites, the VTC is developing methods and tools to enhance existing target models. A new software simulation exists at the VTC to automatically create facet models of camouflage netting by considering the netting as a 2D membrane that balances internal tensional stresses and the external force of gravity by assuming a minimum energy configuration - accurately replicating the draping of real netting. The geometric information of this virtual camouflage netting is exported to a file in a format commonly used for three-dimensional modeling, thereby making it available to workers in signature prediction and visualization.