A Tribute to Opportunity and her Epic Journey, Flying Over Endeavour Crater |
A Tribute to Opportunity and her Epic Journey, Flying Over Endeavour Crater |
Aug 27 2011, 04:21 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 713 Joined: 30-March 05 Member No.: 223 |
Although this is still a work in progress, I would like to share with you a preview of a new project I'm working on:
Flying Over Endeavour Crater - A Tribute to Opportunity and her Epic Journey (The video is best viewed in HD resolution (720p), fullscreen and volume turned up for the background music. Click here for a (still experimental) excerpt as anaglyph (view in HD if possible) Here is some background info for the technically interested: The whole DEM consists of about 3 billions of triangles, modelling Endeavour's west rim at full HiRISE resolution of 25cm/pixel. Unlike the standard method (of draping hi-res 2D imagery over a lower-res 3D DEM), the new technique provides real 3D geometry down to the highest resolution level (i.e. 0.25 m/pixel for HiRISE). This results in a more realistic visualization because each single pixel contributes genuine 3D information - as you can see for example in the low sun images where each pixel is, in principle, capable of casting its own tiny shadow. Rendering this kind of DEMs has been a real challange, though. At 0.25 m post spacing, the models are about 16 times larger than the already huge standard HiRISE DEMs at 1 m/pixel. So together with the mosaics of several full-res CTX frames ( that I'm merging the DEMs with for context ) this results in DEMs of several billions of triangles. Unfortunately this seems to be too much to render with conventional 3D programs such as 3ds-max that are usually limited to some dozens of millions of polygons, but can't readily handle several billions. This is why I decided to write a specialized gigapixel-ready terrain visualization software with a raytracing kernel for realistic soft shadows and global illumination. As this is a rather time consuming work, it is not finished yet (still missing color support and the movie processing chain is still too slow for producing longer flyovers ... ) Hardware is another limiting factor (currently I'm running out of RAM on 24 GB ... but the new gear (48 Gigs + 12 cores) is already on the christmas wishlist... Nevertheless the first results look promising so I thougt I'd share some impressions with the UMSF community |
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Aug 29 2011, 09:29 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 713 Joined: 30-March 05 Member No.: 223 |
Thanks again for all the overwhelming feedback and comments that is greatly appreciated and very encouraging to continue with this work
In the following I will try to answer some technical questions that came up: What software tools did you use to make it? The main processing chain ( 3D model generation and rendering/raytracing ) is all self-written C/C++ software. (though with a rather ugly and spartanic command-line user-interface but specially tuned to manage 3D models consisting of a dozen billion polygons, which I found none of the existing programs could handle :-/ For the pre-processing and preparation of the raw data (map-projection) I use the great ISIS3 package (freely available from USGS). Nothing special for post-processing: Photoshop for still images and the usual video encoders (ffmpeg) for turning the rendered image sequences into movies. QUOTE Do you use a flat plane or a sphere (to represent Mars curvature) as the base? just a flat base with a simple trick to simulate a curved horizon on-the-fly within the raytracer by subtracting a curvature-correction-value (based on the distance to the observer) from the current height above the flat base, while advancing the viewing ray away from the observer through the geometry's bounding volume hierarchy. |
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