Physics-based EO/IR Sensor and Radar Simulation

JRM’s industry-leading physics-based sensor simulation libraries, SIGSIM and SENSIM, have been at the core of MAK’s SensorFX module for VR-Vantage since it was first released in 2009. MAK and JRM engineers have collaborated ever since to ensure a tight integration of JRM’s sensor capabilities with all of VR-Vantage's visual features and shaders – from integrating with our dynamic ocean and atmosphere model, to auto-classifying procedurally-generated terrain on-demand based on land use and GIS feature data. MAK’s VR-Forces CGF is able to drive active thermal regions in SensorFX based on engine status, vehicle speed, and elapsed time. Sensor and optics parameters are controllable at run-time through SensorFX configuration panels in the VR-Vantage GUI.

Physics-based sensor simulations like SensorFX require textures that indicate the materials that make up each element of the terrain and 3D models, because different materials hold heat energy different, and respond differently to various wavelengths of light. For simpler models with few materials, some SensorFX users author these material-classification textures in Photoshop. But MAK also sells the purpose-built GenesisMC tool from JRM to generate material classification textures for use with SensorFX.

MAK’s RadarFX application, which can generate correlated SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) and ISAR (Inverse SAR) images based on the same material classification information as SensorFX, is also built on the SIGSIM and SENSIM libraries from JRM.