Quarterly Progress Report on the Development of the Hurricane Damage Impact Animation Environment

This report summarizes the progress of the continuous development of a hurricane damage animation environment. The proposed development goals for quarter ending June 2003 consist of: 1. LIDAR data filtering • Extract the footprint of each building. • Extract the roof parameters of each building. • Extract the information of each tree, such as size, and location. 2. Building animation • Create and animate the buildings automatically by calling functions provided by VTP. Currently, VTP provides basic functions to create models; however, these functions do not provide the power we need to create realistic buildings, thus we need to further optimize these functions for our purposes. 3. Vegetation animation • Create more realistic models of the vegetation indigenous to South Florida and render them within the animation environment. 4. Water animation • Continue to investigate the algorithms involved in water animation and select the most suitable method of water animation techniques for our system. 5. Data collection and storage • Collect road and vegetation information. We will coordinate with Dr. Zhang and IHC to find out whether we can extract such datasets automatically, by using GIS tools, or if we need to buy the tools from some commercial company. • Collect more texture files for buildings and vegetation in South Florida. 6. Animation program • Currently we use VTP as our animation environment, for future research and development; we need to more fully understand the animation program. • Continue updating the VTP program to make it more suitable for our research purposes. An example would be to implement dynamic terrain switching into VTP. • Fully document internal Software Development • An important future objective is to develop our own animation system that better implements our project's research work. The following is a list of the major development accomplishments made in the past quarter: 1. Improved the current algorithm to extract footprint for each building.