Terragen: Flight Over Olympus Mons
February 18th, 2006 | 
Author: 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.
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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!
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.
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
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?
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.
Blimey! That’s good!