VR-Vantage is the product within the MAK ONE suite that is dedicated to rendering real-time 3D scenes and 2D plan view displays of the synthetic environment.  

VR-Vantage is designed to be used in several distinct ways:

• It is used as a pure Image Generator (IG) to provide realistic scenes for out-the-window or sensor views in simulators.
• It is used as a standalone battlefield information station by overlaying informative graphics on top of realistic 3D scenes or 2D tactical maps.
• VR-Vantage technology is used in VR-Forces and VR-Engage to ensure correlation across all the components of your training and simulation systems.  

VR-Vantage 3.0 is a major feature release with improvements in visual scene quality, rendering performance, 2D and 3D informational graphics and application programming interface (API) simplification.  

For a full list of improvements and bug fixes, explore the full VR‑Vantage 3.0 release notes.

Visual Scene Improvements

VR-Vantage now adds horizon-based ambient occlusion (HBAO) to the long list of graphics techniques that make scenes look realistic. HBAO makes interior corners darker (lowers ambient light) without the creation of additional art. This makes scenes look more grounded and realistic.

Tracked vehicles now move realistically as they turn, with different treads moving at different speeds. This allows for more detailed visual representation of vehicles without additional simulation at the CGF level. This feature is a continuation of a number of similar features added to VR-Vantage in the last few releases including: wheels and treads that rotate correctly for the vehicles current speed, and blades on RW and turbines that spin up or slow down realistically.

IR Illumination 

There have been significant improvements to CameraFX to correctly visualize IR illumination artillery rounds in both NVG and IR mode. These changes were made to directly improve the artillery model but apply to other sources of IR illumination in the scene as well.  

Weather

Though the last several releases MAK has improved the visualization of localized weather. Localized weather allows for the specific weather pattern (snow/rain) to show up exactly where you want it – you can fly above it, drive around it, walk through it, or sail under it. This release adds sleet, snow, and hail to the types of weather that VR-Vantage can render within the synthetic environment.  All the MAK ONE applications supports the NATO Distributed Simulation Federation Object Model (NETN FOM) for communicating the location and type of weather.

Performance

When using VR-Vantage you will notice that many things are just generally faster: Streaming terrains load faster, Virtual Reality rendering is slightly faster, and 2D symbols draw faster (and you can support many more of them!)  

VR-Vantage 3.0 introduces controls to allow users to scale down or limit the amount of VRAM used by moving models and terrain. As MAK adds more content, we are designing models for high fidelity very close interactions. This means models with much higher resolution textures. VR-Vantage still loads all the textures needed for each LOD when we load a model. For users who are looking at models from afar, or who have limited VRAM, VR-Vantage now allows users to configure an automatic down-scaling for high resolution textures on models. This will make the models load faster (remember, VR-Vantage does support model pre-loading) as well as consume less VRAM. Individual models can still be configured to ignore these settings, which makes sense if the model is extremely large (such as an aircraft carrier) or it needs to be seen very closely.

2D and 3D Informational Graphics

VR-Vantage can render many types of informational graphics onto 3D scenes or 2D tactical displays.

We’ve paid a lot of attention in this release to simplifying the graphics and giving control to the user to help make sure that the important information can be seen clearly.

One such tweak is that Tactical Graphics no longer render triangles at each vertex when not selected. This clears a lot of clutter from the display. The triangles are needed by users of the VR-Vantage API (such as VR-Forces) only when for selecting to edit the shape of the tactical graphic. 

Tactical Graphics only show vertices when selected, leading to a cleaner and uncluttered view

Label decorations are simplified and will turn off as the observer zooms out to declutter the screen (fully configurable). Selected or pinned icons will automatically turn on all labels.

API Simplification  

One of the biggest changes to VR-Vantage 3.0 takes place with the API and will only effect customers who have written C++ plugins related to State Listeners and State Visualizers. In previous versions of VR-Vantage many visualizers were heavily dependent on the VR-Link network connection, so adding a new network connection required users to build new visualizers.  This release separates the VR-Link network connection from the drawing/visualizer code – allowing customers to build new visualizers without needing one class for each possible network connection.  

For information about the changes to the Visualizer classes, please see the VR-Vantage Migration Guide distributed with VR-Vantage.

As always, please share your questions and comments with your “engineers down the hall” at support@mak.com, or explore the support resources available at www.mak.com/support.