We've all seen the excellent work Daniel Maas has done in animating the MERs and other missions. This link is to a video of the MER Lauch, Cruise, EDL and surface operation we are familar with, however, it is set to Sunspot by NIN. The music syncs up very well and it is well worth a viewing on that basis alone.

I am posting a new topic because i couldn't find a thread dedicated to the work of Maas.

I "heard" something about Daniel Maas working on MSL mission animation...which would be great!!!
Can anyone confirm this?

Well - I know that he started with the Mars 2001 animation, which then moved on into the very early MER animation, and thereafter the MER animation we know now.

Then, he did the Contour animation, I'm fairly sure the Deep Impact animation is his ( it has his style certainly ), and the Phoenix Animation is obviously going to be derived from the old Mars '01 animation sequence and rushes of that are at the Phoenix website

However - I've not heard anything about an MSL animation yet.

I've swopped a few emails with Dan in the past, not only is he an animation genius, he's also a damn nice chap as well!

Doug

Indeed he did do the Deep Impact animation.

I was told that in addition to being a nice guy he also gives an excellent public talk -- I missed his talk at ISDC because I was at OPAG, but people said he was really good.

--Emily

I have a DVD somewhere ( one of those obscure DVD's you think's going to be rubbish but has some nice footage on it ) , Eye's on Mars I think, I'll double check - and he does an lovely description of how they went about the animation - cracking stuff. And of course, he did the power-tool spoof animation of the rat getting stuck and the rover spinning round throwing off a wheel

Doug

Here is a link to his home page: MAASDIGITAL

I've just remembered - I saw an odd animation that looked like the 2001 animation he did, but it deployed little flying bots that went off and collected samples - I can't find it anymore, but it was very interesting.

You know - I don't think it's an exageration to say that without Dan's earliest animation of MER ( with the round-edges solar arrays ) - MER might never have happened and we might have had MRO in '03 and something else in '05 - I honestly think that bit of animation was just enough to get the senior NASA management and politicians to go "we can do that? COOL....let's build one"

Doug

Maas gave an extended presentation last week at the ISDC (which is where I was for about 10 days of vacation, including pre-and-post-trip-going-crazy).

He showed clips from his work on the rover IMAX film, and considerable detail on how he constructed ultra-detailed-uber-geek-quality models of the rovers down to wire bundles and wire ties, then combined them with rover EDL telemetry and flight reconstructions to show the real landings, plus how he did the work to make the graphics of Endurance crater and the like.

I never saw (I don't recall seeing) a CONTOUR animation, but think I've seen an animation he's done for Phoenix comparable and very similar to the MER program-development animation.

Rushes of the Phoenix anim are here
http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/multimedia/videos/

I can't find the Contour animation online anywhere and it took me forever to find the 2001 animation!

Doug

Here is a Cornell news page with DI stills and the video he made:

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/June05/DanMaas.lxg.html

Did you actually ever see the Contour animation? I could not find it, either:

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/boom/2001sp/maas...-%20CONTOUR.htm

It was interesting and ironic to see that if Contour had survived, it would
have been flying by the very comet that is now totally coming apart at the
seams on June 18, 2006:

http://sco.stsci.edu/contour/PDF/02-0381b.pdf

Thanks for pointing out that .pdf link ljk4-1

I can't find the Contour animation now - really annoying, it was lovely

Someone has Contour Frags A, B and C in Celestia - I think you would be suprised just how far apart 73P and the Contour fragments are...the burn that 'killed' Contour didn't actually complete as I understand it, and there would be a lot of TCM's from then till the various encounters, so whilst I'm not certain, I'd be fairly confident that actually, the three Contour frags are quite some distance from 73P

Doug

http://sco.stsci.edu/contour/news3.html

This mirror at stsci is the only place where it has survived. The official homepage was to be redesigned but they simply deleted it later on:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.contour2002.org

There were rumours about a CONTOUR 2 follow-up but that never happened either.

Ahh - thanks for finding that....the launch sequence ( partially by virtue of being a dusk effect ) is much better than the MER one imho - I love it