The evolution of the stl terrain pipeline to a stamping solution & The Carroll Wiseman crater

The NASA .stls (that is, the topographic 3D models of terrain slices at dimension), which were created from probe fly-by data of the bodies of the Moon and Mars, have been converted to a heightmap .png using a custom capture scene in Unity.

This achieved the following:

  1. Removed all seams on terrain: Where the terrain is one unified slice without any breaks in its smoothness
  2. Allowed the upgrading of the terrain textures to 4k per tile at 1 x 1 tile ratio for extreme terrain definition and fidelity, still within reasonable hardware overhead (Memory available for rendering is affected only slightly)
  3. Has set up the streamlining of all future stamps, whether derived from .stls for extreme accuracy or derived via space agency anaglyphs or height maps. e.g. Adding a new crater, for example, takes seconds instead of an hour or so.

The upgraded pipeline positions Superstring Transition: The Warp Ancestor as a fast iterative simulation of actual planetary terrain in Sol. This is discussed in the latest episodes of Debugging the Solar System.


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