Terramechanics based wheel-soil model in a computer game enviroment

This thesis aimed to develop deformable a virtual terrain which a vehicle can move in and interact with in a realistic manner. The theory used to calculate how the terrain influences the vehicle is based on terramechanics. The terrain is divided into two separate parts, one for visualization and one for physical collisions. Deformations of the graphical layer is calculated on the GPU using compute shader programming. The result of the thesis include a tech demo with a small landscape where an alternate terrain vehicle can deform the terrain as it moves around. The method for deforming the graphical layer is made in such a way so that the computational time does not increase as the size of the terrain does, making the method applicable to actual games