Samenvatting

VSTEP is a software development company that specializes in creating simulators for realistic virtual safety training. During my graduation period, I was assigned to work as a graphics programmer intern on environmental and nighttime effects in the company’s ship simulator NAUTIS. In the current version of the simulator, the night visuals are not realistic enough which takes away a big part of the training value in dark scenarios. Furthermore, a client of VSTEP requested the implementation of convincing warfare and nighttime visual effects for their training sessions. To propose a solution to these requests, ways to integrate and alter custom effects in the underlying engine, UNIGINE, were researched. During the assignment, the relevant effects with the most visual impact on dark scenes were chosen to work on. 
These include the adjustment of the moon shading and water reflections on the ocean surface and the implementation of tidal-lock and celestial body obstructions for the moon sphere. Aside from that, the environment fog was improved by addressing visual artifacts and introducing a different environment preset blending system that is based on the visibility and cloudiness condition parameters. Besides that, light source warfare particle effects, that have the ability to illuminate surrounding geometry, were implemented into the application. Next to that, a performance bottleneck related to using a large number of dynamic lights on transparent surfaces, such as the ocean, was examined. In regards to that, the clustered forward shading optimization was researched.
As a result, it was found out that lighting and environmental shading is the most important for nighttime scenarios as these light sources draw the most attention during the absence of sunlight. Moreover, NAUTIS still has room for dynamic lighting optimizations that would increase the visual quality of a scene without reducing the performance. To achieve that, UNIGINE offers to integrate custom effects by using the engine’s visual effect objects, such as particle systems, or to create new effects by introducing entirely new shader passes into its rendering pipeline.