NASA Terrain Mapping

Terrain via sensor fusion

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Project

DigitalFish and Carnegie Mellon University are collaborating to apply volumetric processing and subdivision surfaces in representing the Martian terrain for planetary-rover mission and science planners. Low-resolution data from orbital assets and very high-resolution surface scans are fused in near-real-time to produce high-quality, multi-textured terrain maps that seamlessly span vastly varying levels of detail.

Why DigitalFish

This project falls outside our typical storytelling-technology focus, but it draws directly on our animation technology expertise with advanced surface representations, geometry and image processing, spatial algorithms and GPU compute. The project applies multiple open-source technologies from the animation industry, including Pixar’s OpenSubdiv, DreamWorks’s OpenVDB, ILM’s OpenEXR, and Disney’s Ptex.

Client

NASA

DigitalFish Contributors

Dan Herman
Doug Epps
Nathan Litke
Adam Wagner
Josh Qualtieri