[X] My Assistant

[AdrianC]

Hello everybody.
I have been reading this forum for quite a while now (8 months+) but never got the nerve and data to actually contribute.
Let me start off by asking everybody two questions.

"What do you think about a high quality remasterization of MSL's MARDI descent and landing imagery?"

"Is it worth the effort having a higher resolution, higher frame rate version of the descent?"

Obviously i'm talking about a high quality remasterization (details will follow). My background is in digital visual effects (VFX) to be more specific 10 years in matchmoving, this involves advanced photogrammetry knowledge, and digital compositing.

Final results will be:
-a minimum horizontal resolution of 2.6K
-25 to 60 fps (TBD)
-derived telemetry overplayed on imagery and current stage (ex. heat shield separation, engines)
-original radio comms as sound.

I am aware of the fact that such attempts already exist (here). This is just a mere optic flow interpolation which dose not do any justice to the mission.

The simplified roadmap is:
-I will use HI-Rise data to create a digital elevation map then convert to a polygonal mesh
-Compute absolute position of each MARDI frame
-Camera project on the ground geometry a series of MARDI frames. Each temporal sample will contribute to a higher resolution image by stacking it on the ground geometry.
-Final rendering will be based ONLY on MARDI data. Interpolation between camera positions will be as physically accurate as possible.

This is no easy task, my estimate is about 40-100 hours of work minimum and lots of data missing.There will be some programming, some small tool developement. But since next month I will be out of a job (corporate financial problems) I thought I might ask you guys about the possible interest of this project.

PS If i posted in the wrong section, I ask the moderators to kindly help me.

[AdrianC]

s the varying color of the terrain due to surface specularity and changing camera position implicite in your flow-chart?
I'd think, that specularity needs to be subtracted away to get phong light conditions and surface specularity separated for an appropriate texture / vertex definition and rendering.
Or do you intend to switch textures during the sequence (working purely with phong), as an alternative?

@Gerald
Specularity will be substracted from each image. This will definitely keep the result close to the original.
I was thinking of complementing the effect with a simple shading model, but in the images we get lots of phenomenons like: specularity, atmospheric diffraction, CCD amplifier glow (vertical glowing strips mostly visible when the shield detaches) etc.
There will be texture switching but performed only on the frames of substracted specularity which will be added back on the final composite.
On the other hand the CCD amplifier glow will be an added effect, because the shield will be an actual animated 3D object with textures derived from the original, but with CG shadows.

It's unclear from the processing flow, but it's possible that that's essentially what he's proposing.

That said, estimating the position and pose of each MARDI frame would be a useful contribution all by itself.

@djellison and @mcaplinger

That is correct. Summing the whole process to a few words is basically MARDI imagery draped over HiRise elevation data.
The key difference I am trying to make is to keep the whole process as scientifically accurate as possible in order to derive some interesting data like: instant altitude, instant velocity, orientation, amount of dust blown before touchdown, etc.
Everything depends on how all the data sets come together.

As a digital VFX artist we usually work with artistic impressions of reality, and mostly because of time constrains, just plain old empirical approaches of just about everything. It may not sound like what "making of" promotional materials describe about movie VFX, but it's just how things are done in this industry. After a whole decade I find this disappointing and inefficient process, with too much decision weight on untrained people like some directors and directors of photography. I'm not naming people but imagine that some DOP's have immensely limited knowledge about optics and basic light behavior and sometimes physics in general.
Please excuse this rant, it's strictly my opinion, but this is one of the main reasons I started this project. It's because I want it to have quantifiable results, not end up as an artistic impression or some "simulation".