near Becquerel Crater:
south of Coprates Chasma:
To do this you need two basic things: height data, and color/texture data.
Finding help online for planetary data is frustrating! Everyone assumes I know way more about this stuff than I do. After much soul searching, this let me convert the data to a massive png picture. Then gimp converted png to greyscale raw. Then Unity used that data to build a heightmap.
Original heightmap data as png (originally 7000 by 20000 pixels):
Cropped heightmap of near becquerel crater (2049 by 2049 pixels):
What? A heightmap is a picture, like the one above, that gives height information. White means high, black means low. At the top left of this height map there is a mountain.
My terrain is still missing one thing: color/texture. Is it green grass? Is it grey glass? Well, it's red Mars. Here I cheated. I don't think color photos of Mars exist at the same resolution as that height map (1 pixel per meter). So... I took high quality color photos of Mars from here and made the abominable assumption of self-similarity in the terrain of Mars. In other words: lets assume a crater that is 100km wide looks about the same as one the size of you.
Limitations: for now my terrain is max 2km by 2km. And there are steps like you see here. Oh well. One day?
Nice looking Mars Terrain. Also, your blog as been added to my RSS reader, so I will see all your updates.
ReplyDeleteThis is very cool. We are creating a game right now that uses NASA imagery of Mars. I was aware that the data existed to do exactly what you are doing, but that is currently outside the scope of our game. I'd love to stay in touch.
ReplyDeleteRobert Madsen
Studio Director, SynapticSwitch, LLC
http://SynapticSwitch.com
rmadsen@synapticswitch.com
Yes, for sure! Sometime in the future I will be using 16 bit raw instead of 8 bit, which should produce much more detailed terrain. I will be updating this blog regularly this summer. Feel free to send me updates on your game too :o
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