3D visualization of flooding in Hart Ditch and Little Calumet River System.

摘要

Hydrological applications such as the flood modeling and the watershed water quality modeling are very popularly applied in real world decision making. Flood modeling is usually adapted to plan and implement flood mitigation works and flood plain mapping. In this research, two immersive virtual 3D applications were developed. The first application was created for simulating the flood flow of a 100 year storm for the Hart Ditch - Little Calumet River System. The second application was developed for simulating a watershed non point source based nutrient load emerging from a storm event. Watershed water quality modeling was done using the N-SPECT model for this second application. The procedures adopted for both the hydrological analyses are presented in this research. The possibility of using game engine to develop 3D application is also explored. Both hydrological applications were developed using Unity game engine platform. 3D game engines provide standard 3D navigation tools as well as any programmable view to create engaging navigation thorough the virtual environment in an user friendly manner. Procedural modeling based processing is used in this research. It is fast and accurate for city modeling which enables the creation of detailed large-scale 3D city models with programmable procedures instead of the standard object creation method which is time consuming and labor intensive.