The texture for Eberswalde took for ever.

Just for you Nige - comparing 1x and 3x elevation at Nili Fossae (one of the MSL landing site proposals). Sat down, did the maths, made sure it was the right total altitude and that the difference between max and min altitiude matched the file headers.

I've actually set both of these rendering in full. The problem is getting the cameras to match exactly. (you can stretch a terrain vertically quite easily, but not the path that a camera takes) so not the exact same view, but it's the same frame number from two very similar animations.

You can probably guess which is the most accurate I can make to the actual, and which is 3x exag of that

For reference, this entire swath is 119.7km wide, 1059 km long - has a max altitude of -857m and a min altitude of -6866m (which I turn into adjusted altitiude based on the hrsc2tif idl module adding a value to make them all positive) - So a terrain altitude 'range' of 6 km from highest to lowest on the whole swath. i.e. 0.6% of the length - hence why they can be a bit dull.

Those swath dimensions refer to this entire box in which the map projected image sits - http://pds-geosciences.wustl.edu/mex/mex-m...88_0000_gr3.jpg - I create an alpha channel for the terrain to remove the crap off the edges, as the displacement process goes nuts with the edge of the elevation map ( hence all the little funky jagged hedges around the edge of most of these )


Doug

Totally uninformed observers comment...

It looks just like the Severn Estuary - complete with the bow south of Gloucester.

http://maps.google.co.uk/?ie=UTF8&ll=5...p;z=11&om=1

Tonight - Eberswalde Crater with a CTX swathe on top, and maybe Nilli Fossae, probably without a CTX swathe on top.

They'll render tomorrow - and we're off playing Guitar Hero 3 tomorrow night, so they'll have to wait till Thursday

Doug

http://www.rlproject.com/HRSC/37/0037_ol_hi.mov (16.4 meg)
http://www.rlproject.com/HRSC/37/0037_ol_lo.mov (6 meg)

http://hrscview.fu-berlin.de/cgi-bin/ion-p?page=entry.ion will always let you look at them in 1x perspective. The problem is, 99% of them are dull as dishwater when you do that

Doug

Just saw iTunes updated, expecting it to be the latest Russell Brand podcast, and it's a new Video Podcast from the NH team about Hibernation! Nice Surprise

There are plans.

Yup - 3ds max, using the VRay renderer for displacement of the terrain.

Oly.Mons to be added later. It's a big noodle much like the very first one, but it's cool

Doug

I can change it very easily - and actually getting it right on 1x elev isn't too problematic either. I've not measured most of these accurately, but they're averaging 1.5ish - 2ish, that sort of thing.

Doug

Commercial comms sats and 70m DSN dishes are very very very different engineering challenges. I can see no way whereby money would be better spent on DSN facilities at L1/L2etc rather than on array facilities on Earth

Optical comms - currently there's no requirement for them. Perhaps once a vehicle uses it and a few ground stations start popping up, then maybe an on-orbit optical comms facility might make some sense - but - you still need ground facilities to which you would relay that data.

Doug

http://www.rlproject.com/HRSC/500/500_around_hi.mov (17.2 meg)
http://www.rlproject.com/HRSC/500/500_around_lo.mov (7.1 meg)



Trying now to do one of Holden and Eberswalde, with a CTX swathe across the Eberswalde part. Cropped myself down to a tiny tiny part of the orig HRSC image, but having to blow it up 5x to match the res of the CTX (i.e. show CTX at full res) is bringing my machine to its knees!

Shh - don't tell it, I've got the RGB to drop on top next

Doug

That would include the replenishment of cryogenics to keep the receivers cool, the replacement of gyros (would gyros even work for a large dish?) and replenishment of thruster fuel to keep the think pointed.

It would cost an utter fortune, a fortune that would be much much better spent on array like DSN facilities on Earth, and upgrades to spacecraft that, with technology that is on the bench ready to go, take Mars-to-Earth comms up by two orders of magnitude over and above MRO.

Doug

As I've said elsewhere, the vert exag is not an exact science yet - but it's far more like 2:1 than 5:1.

Doug

This one (attached - Arsinoes Chaos ) and a very long-noodle of Olympus Mons rendering now.

These things usually have an ND image of 12.5-50m/pixel, 4 colour images of 100-250m/pixel and an elevation image, usually of about the same res as the colour, perhaps slightly lower. Most of the time I drape the colour over the ND to super-res it.

With the Ol. Mons one, I thought "Do I drop the colour over the higher res ND filter?"

Then I discovered the ND is 17568x144800 - That's a full HiRISE image sort of filesize, and the HRSC to Tif convertor has to load the whole image into ram. So that's a no for now On the upside, I should be on 8 gig of ram by the end of the week (dropping 4 more in)

I want to do Elysium Mons, but the DTM is so soft it's a bit dull really.

Doug

http://www.rlproject.com/HRSC/515/515_hi.mov (33.2 meg)
http://www.rlproject.com/HRSC/515/515_lo.mov (10.3 meg)
(both still uploading should be there by midnight - 10 mins from now. Bed time for me

Some DEM's are cool, some not so great. Cloud, ice, fog all screw them up (nothing to co-register for elevation I guess)

http://www.rlproject.com/HRSC/1343/1343_rotate_hi.mov (6.7 meg)

http://www.rlproject.com/HRSC/1343/1343_rotate_lo.mov (2.3 meg)

I know of a case where a family 'named a star' after their son who tragically died aged a few months old. I couldn't bare to tell them the truth after seeing the finder chart on the wall with the name at the bottom. I hope they never find out to be honest.

http://www.rlproject.com/HRSC/446_438/446_438_flydown_hi.mov (10.7 meg)

http://www.rlproject.com/HRSC/446_438/446_438_flydown_lo.mov (3.8 meg)

I'll confess, this one went a bit wrong, and a long swathe of the animation ended up being 'underwater' as it were. So it cut short

http://www.rlproject.com/HRSC/420_380/420_...lyaround_hi.mov (16.6 meg)

http://www.rlproject.com/HRSC/420_380/420_...lyaround_lo.mov (7.1 meg)

Thought I'd start a new thread for stuff done with the HRSC DEM's....

http://www.rlproject.com/HRSC/2039/2039_0000_flydown_hi.mov (8.3 meg)

http://www.rlproject.com/HRSC/2039/2039_0000_flydown_lo.mov (3.0 meg)

It IS the Moon - hence why I cited the PDS where the early MDIS stuff is.

Hmm - what you using to play it? You'll need the latest quicktime. (Although VLC might do it) Save it to your desktop and run it from there, don't ask a browser to play it.

Two more tomorrow. One a bit 'soft' on the terrain (a mosaic with the stitching done with the imagery) and a double for Val-Mer (a mosaic of two with the stitching done with the geometry). The problem with MEX is that it really REALLY doesn't orbit at a standard time of day, so no two neigbour noodles will match up at all - even if you tweak all day. In one case, I've got thick fog in Val-Mer, and the stitch has thing fog. A bit hard to handle really.


Doug

I tried with an iPod Touch, and it was like typing with half my brain missing. Sooooo painfully slow.

Doug

That's the challenge, the data is taken in ribbons (push broom) and thus that's one observation.

I'm currently working on putting two observations in a mosaic ( by doing a mosaic of the imagery first, then simply having one terrain object in 3ds max ) which will, instead of being something like 10,000 pixels long and a 1000 across, be more like 3000 across and 6000 long (380_0001 and 420_0001)

They will always have the feel of looking 'at' a product rather than being in it - simply because it will fall apart if the camera is too close (low resolution).

Doug