Project Brighton Beach Terrain

[Piper]

I've been somewhat inspired by Rodion Herrera's "Brighton Base 2011: An Upgrade to Orbiter's Brighton Beach" to create some realistic scenery for the area around Brighton Beach. I've already created a program that transforms greyscale terrain images into a 3D mesh. The proportions of the terrain are accurate, but I still have to account for the curvature of the Moon's surface (that shouldn't be too difficult). As for the texture though, I've tried using Clementine imagery from Map-a-planet (http://www.mapaplanet.org), but the images I can get from that aren't that great. I'd like to use LRO imagery, which of course would be the highest quality, but I don't know how to go about doing that. Anybody out there know how to go about doing that, or want to take a crack at doing the texture for it?

The area that I've been working with are between Latitudes 40.1484375 and 42.1015625, and between Longitudes 392.4609375 and 394.4140625.

Here are some screenshots of the mesh so far:

The Brighton Beach base is located just south of the depression between that and the mountains.

 

[rodion_herrera]

Great work there Piper!

LRO images of course would be great, however, I don't think it would be "required" to come up with a decent-looking texture. I think a tiling base texture tweaked with some fractal-like clone tools or brushes can work. If some more detailed images of the area (i.e. from Apollo CSM photos) are available, then it can be used as reference to create this "painted" texture. The key is getting light and dark areas (i.e. making sure that any low/flat "mare" type area should be darker/smoother looking) to look right. Baking in shadows can also add to the look, but it won't be good for the main mountains, just for the smaller craters.

Keep up the great work. This is what I love about this community, how one project is sometimes an offshoot/derivative of some other work...this is the essence of "community".

-RODION

 

[astrosammy]

In my Gale Crater I used a part of orbiter's default texture which I extracted (Level 8), combined it with a Viking greyscale image and added some noise.
It does look quite good.

I'm also working on way to fit a mesh to the curvature, if I can make it more accurate I'll post it here.

Oh, and one thing I'd like to recommend is to put the height at the edges of the mesh to zero, that makes it look much better, and can be easily done by just painting the edges of the heightmap black.

Do you plan to release that program you use? I'm currently working with Terranim8or and Anim8or, but maybe your programm can do it better.

 

[rodion_herrera]

Oh, and one thing I'd like to recommend is to put the height at the edges of the mesh to zero, that makes it look much better, and can be easily done by just painting the edges of the heightmap black.

:thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup:

-RODION

 

[Piper]

In my Gale Crater I used a part of orbiter's default texture which I extracted (Level 8), combined it with a Viking greyscale image and added some noise.
It does look quite good.

I was thinking of doing exactly that in the next couple of days (minus the Viking images of course). I wrote a program once before that divides .tex files into its seperate .dds files, so once I dig that up (or re-write it) I should be able to extract the exact area of the Moon's surface I need, which will let me incorporate the mesh seemlessly onto the Moon in Orbiter.

I'm also working on way to fit a mesh to the curvature, if I can make it more accurate I'll post it here.

In the past (like with the scenery for my Io Lander) I just used the tools within Anim8or itself to bend the scenery. In this case, because I know the exact dimensions of the mesh in real-life, and I can calculate the exact Lat/Long of every pixel on the greyscale image, I'll just do it within the program I wrote (it's just basic trig) to get it as perfect as possible.

Oh, and one thing I'd like to recommend is to put the height at the edges of the mesh to zero, that makes it look much better, and can be easily done by just painting the edges of the heightmap black.

I definitely will be doing that. In this case however, I'll actually be painting the edges the same colour as the centre pixel (where Brighton Beach is) since that is used as the 0 height level in the program.

Do you plan to release that program you use? I'm currently working with Terranim8or and Anim8or, but maybe your programm can do it better.

Absolutely. It will be sometime after I finish doing the mesh for Brighton, but not too long. As it is, it's already 90% of the way finished. And if you're curious, it outputs it to a Anim8or file.

---------- Post added Dec 1st, 2011 at 07:57 ---------- Previous post was Nov 30th, 2011 at 18:11 ----------

I did some quick work last night (I'll post screenshots later tonight). The mesh covers a larger area now along its longitudinal axis (width-wise), and the sides of the mesh now smoothly go down to 0. I was going to do that by painting the edges of the bitmap the same color as the centre square, but I've decided to do that using the program itself instead.

 

[Piper]

Here's some more screenshots, this time in Orbiter, and I've adjusted the mesh to conform to the curvature of the moon's surface. All I have to do now is texture it.

 

[Fabri91]

Thanks, this looks great!

 

[N_Molson]

It's good to see an non-flat horizon from that base :thumbup:

 

[Cras]

This looks great. Thanks