Simulation and Optimization of Large Passenger Ship Based on Unity 3D

Abstract

With the rapid advancement of virtual reality (VR) technology and maritime engineering, the demand for high-performance simulation systems has significantly increased. However, when developing large-scale 3D ship virtual simulation often encounters challenges, such as excessive polygon counts in models and unsustainable computing resource consumption resulting in memory overload, system lag, and delayed loading. This paper describes the development process of a virtual reality simulation for the cruise ship "Tianhai New Century", alongside the system comprising four optimization strategies and the corresponding experimental results: (1) A six-degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) mathematical model of ship motion is established, and a hybrid modeling approach combining NURBS curves, polygon meshes, and primitive modeling to construct a high-precision 3D digital ship model. (2) A simulation system integrating virtual scene roaming, Unity Graphical User Interface (UGUI), and dynamic sailing scenarios has been developed using Unity3D; (3) Four optimization strategies-including a dual-layer clipping algorithm, code-loading optimization, texture compression, and hull surface mesh simplification. Experimental results demonstrate a 4x improvement in rendering efficiency (from 30 FPS to 120 FPS) and reduce the memory consumption by 50.17% (from 2.81 GB to 1.40 GB), reducing graphics rendering complexity, vertex counting and shadow calculation overhead, etc., and providing a scalable solution for subsequent simulation.