How to realized Thermal Imaging and Night Vision

[werner.poetzelberger]

Dear all,

 

how do you think, Night vision and Thermal Imaging (black hot) would be possible?

 

I read somewhere, that there will be a night vision implementation sometime. Will this be a postprocess?

I would guess for a Thermal Image there is more then a Post Effect needed?

 

Happy to hear any ideas.

best.

Werner

[nat.harrold]

Ulf made some great suggestions here a long time ago and Alexander implemented back end:

 

https://developer.unigine.com/forum/topic/112-solved-general-material-auxiliary-support/?hl=thermal#entry559

 

 

and here:

 

https://developer.unigine.com/forum/topic/106-surface-camera-mask/?hl=thermal#entry501

 

 

These perhaps in combination with LUT grading (for night vision):

 

https://developer.unigine.com/forum/topic/1881-ai3d-tech-demo-finished-put-aside-for-now/?hl=LUT#entry10231

[ulf.schroeter]

Good looking night vision goggle view can be for sure implemented quite easily with simple greenish LUT color transform, some blur and random noise in a post-process shader. This is the standard approach in most games with quite convincing results. The only challenge in case of night vision is the realistic simulation of the heavy glow effect surrounding even very weak light sources (e.g. stars, position lights or traces ammunition)

 

Realistic thermal view simulation though is a quite complex beast requiring much more efforts for goood results. First of all (in most cases) you need to assign additional material code textures to most objects. Based on this material codes dedicated shaders will be required to simulate the different heating and IR characteristics depending on time of day (e.g. IR crossover), sun light position, materials (e.g. glas showing quite a very different behaviour in IR spectrum, than in visible light spectrum), object activity (e.g. heated wheels of cars on the move, heated gun barrel after firing a round) and inherent heat source (e.g. engines), weather effects (e.g. rain, clouds,.....), ...., ...., ....

 

Just some visual examples http://www.flir.com/uploadedfiles/cvs_americas/security/securityfamilybrochure.pdf

[werner.poetzelberger]

This is what I thought. So the temperature has to be encoded, somehow. Maybe with a 'Heat Texture'. But sure, this also has to be dynamic.

Not an easy task, but interesting.

Depends on what we wanna do, I see interesting things coming up.

 

cheers

[ulf.schroeter]

In most cases a material code texture (e.g. 1= metal, 2= rubber, 3= glass, ...) Will be required if you have to simulate time of day effects, as different materials have quite different thermal capacity effecting their temperature changes throughout the day (water more or less keeps regenerator during day/night, metal quickly changes body temperature). Key problem in this area is texture minification filtering when viewing objects from larger distances as material codes cannot be averaged like diffuse colours.

 

Some insight can be found here

 

http://www.presagis.com/resources/whitepapers/i24_reconstructing_thermal_emissions_on_the_gpu_using_an_indexed_texture_format_that_texture_filter/

 

And of course there are more interesting effects in the IR spectrum like heat trails of moving objects etc.