High-Level Project Summary
A system that gathers real weather data from the past, present, and forecasted future. And then use such data to simulate the happening in Unreal Engine 5 such as wind, temperature, and rainfall.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
The system aims to simulate the weather conditions of a specified location on Earth. Such as wind direction, temperature, and rainfall. It loads a webpage of Zoom Earth, captures a screenshot with a simulated input of the mouse hovered on a coordinate for the details, saves the image, and then extracts the weather information using an Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning based OCR (Optical Character Recognition). The cycle repeats in a loop until closed.
The output data would be fed to Unreal Engine 5 and uses its parameters for a weather simulation, including wind that affects clothes, objects and foliages, temperature, and Niagara Weather for rain and snow.
The system can also be upgraded to include the wind forecasts 1 day in advance and simulate their damages and rain. As well as simulate weather data 2 days from the past. Real 3D captures of places may also be imported to UE5 for more precise simulations, possibly in the future.
The project was done in an Intel i5, with an Nvidia GTX 1660 TI with CUDA compute 7.5.
The programs are written in Python and C++
Space Agency Data
The system used Zoom Earth's Base Satellite Data which they acquired from NASA.
Hackathon Journey
It took me half a week and lots of brain power and coupled traumatic experiences trying to track the recent Hurricane Ian. I learned a lot about Unreal Engine 5, as well as computational fluid dynamics and aerodynamics.
I would like to thank all the YouTubers who made tutorials about UE5 and OCR, people from StackOverFlow who helped me debug code, people from my university who showed me the link to the NASA Space Apps Challenge, and my Facebook and Discords friends, and family who keep supporting me over the Hackathon and understanding me.
References
Cloth and Wind Simulation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjOq8OB_3AQ&t=314s
Solid Object Wind Simulation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9lVADyd8ZQ&t=2119s
Optical Character Recognition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVKaWPW9oQY
Weather Data: https://zoom.earth/
Unreal Engine 5: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/unreal-engine-5