image Development Update – Atmospherics image Development Update – Spectral Materials in Niagara

Happy Birthday Infinite Studio

One year ago, Consilium Technology announced the commercial release of Infinite Studio — cutting-edge software for real-time radiometrically credible simulation of imagery, across the visible and infra-red spectrum.

Since the launch of Infinite Studio by the Minister of Defence at SCINDICATE 2018, our team has continued to improve the quality of existing capabilities, as well as expand to new capabilities. In the last year, we have added new talent to our team and are on the hunt for even more individuals to support the continually growing demand for our product. We have a schedule of posts lined up to explain in more detail some of our new and improved capabilities, but for now, here is a summary of our new features in the last year! 

Improvements to ocean surface materials, emissions and updated customisable wave spectrum.

  • New geometry for ocean surface which provides better performance, upwards of +20 fps more than previously achieved.
  • The geometry is more detailed near the viewer, with adaptive tessellation used to provide detail when zooming
  • Black reflection spots removed on the ocean surface and removed flattening of ocean normals (which was the original fix to the black spots)
  • You can now modify ocean blueprint properties without having to toggle WaveSpectrum “tick in editor”
The left section of the high-resolution image shows the previous iteration of the ocean material prior to the 3.6.0 release. The right section is what the ocean now looks like after the implemented improvements.

New boat dynamics with the Buoyancy Data UV Component

  • The Buoyancy component adds buoyant forces to an actor. The Buoyancy Data UV generates position, normal and area maps (buoyancy textures) for the given mesh. Buoyancy data is calculated based on model UV coordinates. A custom buoyant hull may also be used.
  • These features are available in the current Infinite Studio 3.6 release!

Update to Unreal Engine 4.22

Atmosphere improvements in quality and run-time performance

  • The Spec Atmosphere Modtran asset has been improved to generate MODTRAN 6 atmospheric lookup data at different levels of quality levels, from “preview” to “production” in quality, for different altitudes, ranges and look angles (azimuth & zenith).
  • The Spec Atmosphere Modtran is now an editor-only asset and is used to create the run-time Spec Atmosphere In-Band asset providing for improved run-time performance.
  • The new Spec Atmosphere In-Band run-time asset contains pre-calculated (cache) in-band sensor look-up textures and curves.
  • The Spec Atmosphere Actor has been updated to use the new Spec Atmosphere In-Band run-time asset.
This image demonstrates the updated atmospherics over Hamilton Island at sunset.

Spec material improvements to make creating materials more streamlined and user friendly

  • Material Expressions are the building blocks used to create fully functional materials in Unreal Engine 4.
  • Each material expression is a self-contained black box that either outputs a set of one or more specific values or performs a single operation on one or more inputs and then outputs the results of that operation.
  • To check out our updates to the materials, check the User Guide!

New Street Map Importer plugin

  • The Street Map Actor facilitates the creation of landscape scenes based on data imported from Open Street Maps.
The top left image shows the Open Street Map data imported into the Unreal Engine Editor. The bottom right image shows the landscape automatically generated by our new StreetMap Importer plugin.

New Python External Control Client

  • The new Python API allows Infinite Studio to connect to your third-party simulation environment. Use the built-in functionality, or utilise the API to create your own custom message types.

New Camera Writers for recording rendered imagery to file

  • Camera Writers allow for SpecSceneCaptureComponents to output to any format. Contained in the 3.6.0 release are example output writers for raw binaries and PNG files, but the system is modular to allow for custom writers to be implemented.

New Spec Orbit Camera Actor for use in Machine Learning

  • The Spec Orbit Camera is a specialised Spec Scene Capture 2D Actor, for use in machine learning or data analytics task, that orbits about a given target writing captured image output to Saved/VideoCaptures.

New Stencil Labelling feature

  • The Stencil Label Actor allows for labelling of actors in a scene for use in machine learning or data analytics tasks. The Stencil Label Actor can use a Data Table to specify labels between 0 – 255 which will be output in the alpha channel of the final image, and to ensure consistency across different maps.
This image shows a scene with several different simple objects, viewed through the Custom Stencil – Buffer Visualisation View Mode. The objects are being identified through their uniquely set stencil values, which have been defined in the editor either manually, or through an imported data table.

New Apply Atmosphere material function for correct application of the atmosphere for transparent objects

  • The MF_ApplyAtmosphere node in a material is used to apply path radiance / transmission to material attributes. This is ensures correct atmospheric scattering is easily applied on both the near and far side of the transparent object.

New Volume Displaced Wake Source Component for ship wakes

  • The Volume Displaced Wake Source Component is an experimental feature to support high fidelity real-time ship wakes.
  • This feature adds coupled feedback to the ship and ocean surface with high fidelity ocean displacement over a 4 x 4 km region!

Happy 1st Birthday Infinite Studio! All of us at Consilium Technology are excited to see where the coming year will take us.


Consilium Technology has industry experts leading an experienced team of specialists and software engineers developing Infinite Studio, a cutting-edge software technology for real-time, radiometrically credible simulation of imagery across the visible and infra-red spectrum. Infinite Studio is built upon Unreal Engine and DST Group’s VIRSuite radiometric modelling technology, which has been designed to support a broad range of simulation environments, including maritime, air, land and littoral. Over ten years of Defence research and development (R&D) underpin this unique capability, bringing advanced scene generation to researchers through the power of affordable desktop computing and modern gaming engines. 

Want to find out how Infinite Studio can benefit your company? Contact us today and we’ll help you discover how.