Spurred on by the explosive growth of the video game market, game engine technology advances at a breakneck pace. Environments that once required a large team of artists, designers, and programmers to create can now be accomplished by a small team or even an enterprising individual. Stiff competition means that many game engines are very cost effective, if not free. Premade assets and plugins are a cost-effective means of quickly adding content and functionality to a virtual scene. The Gaming Research Integration for Learning Laboratory (GRILL) has used virtual environments constructed in modern game engines as a cost-effective augmentation to Live, Virtual, and Constructive (LVC) training. This paper summarizes the construction of two virtual environments in Unreal Engine. The first is an urban environment with different settings and props in which study participants are asked to evaluate levels of trust in various settings. The second is of the 50-acre training site "Calamityville," located at the National Center for Medical Readiness in Fairborn, OH. Various tools, techniques, and lessons learned from building the two virtual training sites are covered in this paper. Principle elements to build a virtual environment include survey techniques; 3D model construction; integration of models and assets; terrain and landscape development; and, lastly, scripting. By using a game engine and a modern development pipeline rich, high-fidelity, cost-effective environments can be constructed to aid in LVC training.
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