Terragen: Flight Over Olympus Mons
Published on 18 Feb 2006 at 5:02 pm.
7 Comments.
Filed under Images, Terragen.
Sounds cool eh?
I took a Digital Elevation Map (DEM) of the surface of Mars, isolated the area around Olympus Mons, and imported it into Terragen. I then created a camera script of fly over the martian volcano. Admittedly I could have done a much better job with the surface texture and the vertical scale is a little off… but you get the idea! It took 14 hours to render this on my dual 1 GHz processor Mac so it wasn’t like I could say “oops let me fix that” and buzz off another render. Next time I’ll endeavor to get the scene looking perfect BEFORE I run the job.
My intention is to do a fly-though of Valles Marineris.
Anyway, here’s Olympus_Mons_Overflight.mov (6.9 MB)
You’ll need Apple - QuickTime to view the file.
Matt on 18 Feb 2006 at 5:44 pm: 1
Not only sounds cool, it is cool!
I wonder how long this will take to render on a Mac Mini or a Powerbook
Time for a Quad 2.5GHz PowerMac!
Rob on 18 Feb 2006 at 6:14 pm: 2
It would probably be FASTER.
Terragen is not multithreaded so the extra processor does nothing for me. My Mac is a 2002 so the processor and bus speeds on the more modern Macs will definitely be faster.
Yes I intend to grab me a Quad G5 as soon as the Intel desktop Macs are announced. The price will drop a little as they try to get rid of them.
I’ve got WAY to much invested in PowerPC to run it all in emulation on an Intel Mac.
Ian Musgrave on 19 Feb 2006 at 5:57 am: 3
Sadly, all I get in either my PC version of Quicktime or in RealPlayer is a white screen. It sounds cool though. My aging conmputer is too slow to do this, so I shall have to stick to Celestia for my planetary flybys
Matt on 19 Feb 2006 at 3:20 pm: 4
That’s too bad Ian, Robs work is stunning.
Rob, I thought Apple’s Rosetta was the key to migrating all applications magically over to the new MacIntels?
Rob on 19 Feb 2006 at 3:32 pm: 5
That is correct regarding Rosetta, but like Classic was to OS X it is an emulation layer. I have all current versions of MS Office, Adobe CS2 suite, Macromedia Studio MX suite… I guarantee you the upgrade to Mactel will NOT be free.
Running Photoshop in emulation just isn’t an option UNLESS it STILL outperforms a Quad G5.
I’ll have to make that final call when I’m ready to buy my next comp.
Dave Pearson on 20 Feb 2006 at 9:28 am: 6
Blimey! That’s good!
Dirty Skies : Terragen: Olympus Mons for real on 22 Feb 2006 at 3:31 am: 7
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