USGS HiRISE DEM of the Columbia Hills
HiRISE is awesome. HiRISE + Randy Kirk = more awesome. This is derived from a brilliant dataset released at the USGS Astrogeology site
Workflow was essentially ISIS CUB to raw unsigned 16 bit data and then imported into Photoshop to make a 16bit PNG. That then feeds into 3ds max onto a plane which is modified using Vray which can do great displacement mapping. I then have a second plane, with perhaps 200×50 polygons, displaced the old fashioned way as a ‘mockup’ to animate over.
This isn’t rendered, but of course the rendered plane courtesy of Vray can’t be displaced in real time. The JP2 HiRISE image is mapped over the top of this. Earlier versions ( Including the APOD version, which they found at Emily’s blog ) were rendered with a light of marsish colour, and a sky of marsish colour derived from a paper on the colour of the martian sky by Jim Bell et.al.
For this latest, and final version, a more interesting sky with clouds, graduated brightness and some haze just takes it up a notch or two. We start at a couple of hundred feet above the Spirit landing site, flying SE toward the Columbia Hills past Bonneville Crater, before ending up looking back at Home Plate from Von Braun and Goddard and panning up to show Spirit in the context of her complete journey of more than 4 miles.
Full HD H264 Quicktime Movie ( 28 meg )
Low SD H264 Quicktime Movie ( 8 meg )
Comments and Questions? Visit the appropriate UMSF thread