Late last week I stumbled upon a few HiRISE derived DEM's (Randy Kirk works his magic once again!)

http://webgis.wr.usgs.gov/ftphirise/index.jsp (URL now down)

I'm working on both Vic Crater and the Columbia Hills. Fortunately, now I've got a Mac, I can use ISIS. I've figured out a fairly simple flow ( isis2raw as 16 bit unsigned, and then imported into Photoshop ) to take DEM CUB's and make 16 bit PNG's

Just to demo how important that is for me as an animator - sliced comparisons of 8bit vs 16 bit.

A busy week unfortunately, but animations of various sorts are in the pipeline.

In general, I find 8 bit DEMs almost useless. They can sometimes be used by converting them to 16 bits and smoothing them - I almost never use them without fairly extensive processing.

Still figuring out the best way to explore and display these dems - especially the Colubia Hills.

Meanwhile - a revisit of an idea I had some years ago using a MOC dem. This is the 'power goodness' display - lit from the north in green, the south in red. A wider angle, and a close angle.

And using the Victoria one to simulate shadowing with the sun high in the sky, and as low in the sky as it gets ( 63ish degrees )

http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00001395/

D

I've had a hard time trying to do justice to these data sets, the Columbia Hills and the Victoria Crater HiRISE Dem's.

Here's my effort for the Columbia Hills
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/doug_im...bia_dem_480.mov
(4.8 meg)

Victoria Crater (with added 'rover') tomorrow

And Victoria crater

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/doug_im...ria_dem_480.mov

3.8 meg.

Enjoy.



D

Cooler than a penguin sat on an iceberg, sucking an ice lolly and wearing underpants full of ice.

Agree, very very cool!

All that's needed to make us happy is to tack onto the end of the movie a little video of Oppy SAFELY driving out of VC!!

I rendered a jumbo 4kx4k fisheye then polar-to-rectangled it back into this.

It's hard to get the rover wheels to sit on the terrain when the terrain doesn't actually appear until you render it

I hope you all enjoyed the movies at full res courtesy of Emily on TPS's Blog

I'm open to requests etc. My favorite thing to play with is lighting, this is a particularly nice shot, although it does bring out the trouble with the CCD's.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080519.html

Doug

Well done! About time your work on these DEMs was recognised properly.

Magnifique!

Bra-VO!!! Superbly rendered...and appropriately recognized at last!!!

Just for fun, I actually have a better version on the burner right now Clouds, sun, haze etc. Results over the next few days.

These are great- nice job Doug!

I'm still looking forward to seeing more near-surface images or animations from HIRISE DEMs of other places that we haven't sent rovers to- these could be even more interesting than views of the familiar Spirit and Opportunity landscapes.

Well - there are four done for various Phoenix sites, but, how can I be nice about this....

They're dull. Very very dull.

I think many of the MSL candidates will get a DEM treatment, hopefully those will make it out the door as well.

Doug

Your work put everything in a new perspective and that's what exploration is all about
Hat off
Thanks

Congrats, Doug!
Unfortunately, the movie is almost invisible on my PC (it starts very slowly, then stops download after few frames...). Moreover, I do not find the old Emily's blog movies!
Some help???

I thoroughly enjoyed seeing these on TPS - why did I forget to say so right away? - Vertical scale looks realistic too, though Victoria's cliffs seem a bit rounded off.

The cliffs are a bit rounded off, just a symptom of the resolution (1m per 'pixel' for elevation) really.

And, to the very best of my abilities, they are accurate for elevation, as close as I could possibly make it. The clincher is that rendering the Columbia one from the landing site - it's a perfect replica of the success pan images of the hills.

The proper movies are here - http://planetary.org/blog/article/00001423/ - although I intend to update the Columbia one later today - links later Randy Kirk got some nice emails about them, which is good because it's his hard work that made the data, and his kindness that put it 'out there' for nutters like me to play with.

Doug

Ah, I knew that was one of yours, yet when I checked APOD this morning (10:00), your name wasn't in the credit line (which I thought was a bit out of order).

Click to view attachment

I didn't know it had been posted on there. I got an email from Randy who had got emails from people saying how cool it was. He told me, and then told Bob to edit the descriptor. Then we realised is talked about MSSS / MOC / MGS, and tweaked that as well. Then I realised Bob had linked to my highly unfinished and quite broken soon-to-be-blog.

Finished thing is now here : http://www.dougellison.com/?p=5

Enjoy

Not found

Yeah, went hunting myself...no joy.

Did enjoy the "sermon" post, though...

Now I can see them and are superb! Thanks.
What do you think about adding a local high-res texture based on last panoramas, all around the MERs? I think this would add dramatic realism, reducing also the innatural contrast between rovers and smoothed DEM terrain...

Two problems with that. If I had, say, 1cm/pixel imagery around the rover - then my image map would have to be 1cm per pixel. There isn't an easy way to accurately place a second texture on top of the MRO one without actually making the whole thing 1cm pixel. That would mean a texture 800,000 pixels across. No cigar. I went down that road with CTX - on - HRSC DEM's. It was a bloody nightmare, and the results didn't pay off.

The other problem is that at the moment, it all sits together quite nicely. Panoramas don't make good maps very easily.Only a few M from the rover, it's warped and distorted beyond the point of usefullness. ( for eg - http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data/mer2-...8l000m2.img.jpg ) and for the brief moment we are close to the rover, it wouldn't be worth the hassle.

Adding terrain meshes to the Victoria crater one is something I've already had a look at ( I thought the capes might benefit ) but given up on. The meshes themselves just don't stand up to the level of quality to make it worth while.

Always helps to actually publish the damn thing http://www.dougellison.com/?p=5 is now working. That, for now, is my last treatment of the Columbia one. What I'd REALLY REALLY love to be able to do, is some sort of realtime thing where you can drive around it on a quad bike. I'm sure Half Life 2 could manage it, but I just don't know how to put a million polygons into a game like that

Doug

When I've opened up the "view new posts" I've seen your message here above (I know that you're ok by now) and then this one from Doug from the "Lidar" topic
"Upgrade the DSN to the proposed 400 x 12m dish arrays, and put a 6m dish on the spacecraft - then you can do 320 Mbps from Mars to Earth"
When you put them together aside, it's kind of, what, injustice? Frustating?

Doug, I perfectly understand the issue you described, I had same problem when I tried to realize a "power of 10"-like movie initially showing all the red planed and then zooming on one rover (Emily suggested such idea long time ago, do you remember?).
Now I solved the issue by making a dedicated POV-RAY script who shades between various textures with different scales, anyway I abandoned the mars-zoom idea due to absence of time (for the moment!). Anyway, this idea is working well only if you strongly zoom on a planar surface, so is not applicable to your 3D DEM... I think the best way to avoid use of mega-textures is to overlap a local, texturized "mini_DEM" surface on the big one, eventually using 3D terrain model computed from MER stereo cam (someting like this was available on venerable "Maestro" JPL software... now I do not know where to find it). In the outer parts, such mini-DEM should appear progressively shaded in order to have a smooth transition effect. I know is not simple, it is only a suggestion for possible, future works...
About your last treatment of the Columbia movie, I like it very much. My only observation is about the colors: personally, I would like more saturation, with different hue between red terrain and a yellow artificial sky... What do you think about?

I think you should have a go yourself

I know what you mean about the colour. The sky colour is, imho, quite accurate. The ground colour is a little washed out. The simulation from here http://www.marslive.co.uk/?p=5 is a better looking product, BUT, the orientation of the sun when rendering, and when the HiRISE image was taken would contradict. The sun has to be to the west, and reasonably high, to be honest to the shading of the texture on the surface.

I'm not touching it again for a long time. I'm happy to put the 16bit PNG DEM up somewhere if you want to grab it and have a go.

Doug

I'd love to try using it... maybe in a month or two. It would be neat if it were possible to use it in MMB, with rover POV images overlayed on a modeled background. But I won't have time to even think about that for a couple months at least.

I would love to take a stab at this in a realtime stereo visualization environment. If the 16bit PNG DEM were available I could probably get something up and running in a day or two. It would be a real test for my system.

Cheers,
-Kevin

I prepared this for someone else - thought forum people might enjoy it

1) Install ISIS 3 - instructions here http://isis.astrogeology.usgs.gov/document...uide/index.html
2) While letting that happen - grab one of Randy's DEM's - I'm using the Victoria Crater bundle as an example
3) Find DEM_1m_VictoriaCrater.cub.gz (it's in the ISIS_EQUI360_OC folder ) and expand it
4) Run isis2raw
5) In the 'FROM' window - point to the .cub
6) Copy and paste the path and filename into 'TO' - but change the extension to .dem or something simiar
7) U16BIT data type ( screenshot attached)
8) Hit Run.... if this bit doesn't work - it's almost certainly your ISIS3 installation that needs looking at, make sure you got all the Base Data.
9) Find the .cub and open in text edit and find this part...

/* Core description */
CORE_ITEMS = (1278,1694,1)

10) Open Photoshop, and open the .dem.raw that ISIS3 produced
11) Width is the first of those three figure under CORE_ITEMS. Height is the second. Depth should be 16 bits, Byte Order as IBM PC, Header as size 0
12) Hit OK
13) Save out as 16 bit PNG, celebrate, have lunch, dump into your favourite animation package.

Gale Crater dem up
http://www.dougellison.com/?p=44#content

Doug

OK, now that's cool.

For those that don't want to or can't install ISIS3 I thought you might want to know how to do this using GDAL.

1.) Install FWTools (Lunix, Windows) or GDAL framework for Macs:
Linux, Windows: http://fwtools.maptools.org/
mac: http://www.kyngchaos.com/wiki/doku.php?id=...ware:frameworks
--Now I don't have experience getting these mac frameworks working. But I have heard it is easy.

once GDAL is installed and working, run:
1.) gdalinfo -stats DEM_1m_VictoriaCrater.cub (or GIS Tiff)
--note the min and max.
2.) gdal_translate -of PNG -ot UINT16 -a_nodata 0 -scale stats_min stats_max 1 10000 DEM_1m_VictoriaCrater.cub DEM_1m_VictoriaCrater_unit16.png

where
-of PNG = output format PNG
-ot UNIT16 = output type Unsgned 16 bit Int
-a_nodata 0 = Set all input NULL value to 0 on output
-scale in_min_value in_max_value out_min_value out_max_value = will apply a linear scale from input to output.
then just the input and output filenames.

That is it. It would be nice to know if this method works for anyone.

-thare

Note: I picked 10000 as the max scaled output but you may have to play with that value for your 3D app.

Doing an updated 2009 version of my Columbia Hills DEM. Bit of a bug in the first render, but should be finished tomorrow night.

Just got a new Core i7 860 CPU. My Q6600 has been retired to status of render node. New rig does these frames in about 35 seconds. Old rig in about 60 seconds - so I've nearly trebled my rendering power

FINISHED

http://www.dougellison.com/?p=82

Not perfect - but it's about the best I can do.

Like flying around - brilliant !

Robert

Love the dusty quality of the atmosphere. An easy post for tomorrow

--Emily

Hi Doug,

unbelievable job on the fly around! Thank you.

You say its the best you can do....but for me...that fly-around is the best I could ever dream about doing.

Cheers

I love how Spirit appears suddenly behind Home Plate. Very dramatic! Great job!

Superb.

on Mars, on Mars, on Mars...



Thankyou.

p

Ah, always nice to meet a fellow KSR fan...

Doug, that's just...beautiful. With all the beauty the word can carry. Thanks.

I knew you were not going to sent the MER team "only" a postcard for the 3rd anniversary...
Very dramatic and beuatifull indeed, thanks.

Great animation djellison. I really like it a lot.

I never knew about the hi-res topography data on USGS, so I decided to download some of it for myself to play around with. I went and downloaded Victoria crater and it has everything in a .tif format (as well as the .cub files) and it all works except for the DEM .tif file. When I load it up in photoshop it's all black. I went and downloaded GDAL and loaded up the DEM .cub file and it shows up in there. I exported it as a .tif from there, but it still does not show in photoshop. Does anyone know what I'm missing here?

I haven't tried to work with the DEM data at all, so this is a shot in the dark, but my first question would be: is the file 16-bit, and if so, is all the data down in the first 12 bits? That's one reason things can look black in Photoshop. Check Image > Adjust > Levels and see if the histogram shows anything at all.