This demonstration was written for the CAVE to take the user into a 3d disaster simulation. At the push of a button, a bomb explodes and the scene changes from a peaceful urban environment to a chaotic, destroyed office building and neighborhood.

The Disaster Scenario was developed by the UM3D Lab at the request of the Medical School and the UM Government Relations Office.

One of the main goals of the simulation was to capture the atmospheric and environmental changes that occur during such an event. To do this, several techniques and tricks were employed to get convincing lighting, shadows, and sound within the CAVE environment. Achieving such effects presented a challenge, since many of these features are not part of the standard CAVE computing environment.

First, the before and after scenes were created with 3D Studio Max 5.0. Geometry was created using various low polygon modeling techniques. Each scene is composed of approximately 26,000 polygons. Once the two models were completed, we could move on to lighting and texture mapping.

wireframe, solid, and textured renders of the "chaotic" office scene.

To help in the creation of a convincing environment, photographs were taken of common work space elements (i.e. bricks and carpet) and cleaned up in Photoshop for use as textures on many of the scene's objects. Several lights were then placed to get the desired highlights and shadows required for the desired dramatic look.

Once all the lights were in place, the development team took advantage of 3D Studio Max's render-to-texture feature. Rendering to texture takes all the objects and textures in a scene, performs lighting calculations for those objects and stores -or "bakes"- the results into a single texture to be used as a universal reference.

In essence, Max calculates all the illumination and shadows for objects and conveniently stores that information in one texture that can be used for the entire scene. This allows for high quality lighting with a significantly reduced additional computational load, greatly improving the look and feel of the demo.

The left image represents the texture generated by 3D Studio Max for the "chaotic" interior office space, including lighting. The right image was generated for the characters in the same scene.

The left image represents the scene before the Render to Texture work has been applied, while the image on the right includes the texture-based shadows. Notice how spatial perception is improved with the shadows in the scene.

For the audio component, several pieces of code were written to allow us to trigger and loop sounds. A large audio sample was composed and used as a repeating sequence inside the environment. To get the sound to play correctly, a series of scripts were triggered from the main application to start playing a sound and repeat it for 5 minutes.