SimHDR provides plug-in modeling and shader-based rendering of physically-accurate illumination, atmospherics, and cultural lighting in High Dynamic Range for visual applications and Image Generators.

Why chose SimHDR?

The natural world is not displayed in 0-255 values, why should your visual display be?

Modern visual and sensor simulations often require the most realistic scene with the highest fidelity possible to meet the stringent training requirements. SimHDR expands your current visual application to a fully High-Dynamic Range Rendering (HDRR) pipeline that provides significant advantages of traditional rendering approaches. With SimHDR, a scene can be rendered with an extremely large contrast ratio while maintaining all of the details within the scene… in other words, bright things will be extremely bright, dark things will be extremely dark, and the details of elements in the scene remain visible in both. The high dynamic range rendering of SimHDR allows for the luminance and radiance (pixel intensity) values to extend beyond a [0…1] range with all of the computations done in true floating point values. Besides, nature is not confined to a [0…1] range so neither should your simulation environment!

Product Details

SimHDR is a real-time multi-spectral radiative transfer model that provides GPU-based functions for computing illumination and shading for day and night for all geometry in the scene. SimHDR can be delivered as a Software Development Kit (SDK) to add physics-based signature modeling and high-dynamic range rendering capabilities to existing visualization applications. SimHDR models the atmosphere’s interaction with the natural lighting as impacted by three scattering and absorption mediums: gas, aerosol, and hydrometeor.  The result is a more realistic, correlated, and higher fidelity representations of accurate atmospherics for Out the Window (OTW) and sensor applications.

SimHDR also provides high-density cultural lighting representations in support of advanced night-urban applications.  SimHDR is designed to leverage and facilitate the integration of NPSI physics-based data types and provides integrated capabilities for automatically using NPSI-attributed data to generate scene content.

SimHDR combines signature predictions anchored in the physical sciences with the expanding power of commercial graphics hardware technologies to deliver complex GPU-based physical effects in real-time.  The open API and minimally-invasive GPU shader management technology provides portability to any existing OpenGL-based application. SimHDR is portable across COTS GPU and operating system environments and easily integrated into third party applications.  It is currently maintained on both Windows and Linux platforms.