Swing Shift

You would think that since my device is a geo-thermal whatchmagig that I would be looking to model a volcano like Olympus Mons…  but no.  Inspired by the passages about Jurenta Chasm and the pits, I decided to actually try to find some images to see what was being talked about.  (And I was trying to find aerial maps for studio and discovered that there are actually maps of Mars for Google Earth and that NASA has their own little beauty which comes with other planets. Yea!) 

Anyway, so my first inspirational pics were these lovelies from Noctis Labyrinthus.

    

 From here, I decided to look at landslides and pit mines.  Of course.

   

And I just like this image…

The Process:

After reading the passages, looking at some images and digging around in my brain for thoughts about Mars, I started out in AutoCad with this piece of one of the images of Noctis Labyrinthus.  I needed something to start from and this piece had the points I was looking for:  canyon/gash, craters, peaks, valleys.

I drew in a few contour lines in AutoCad and brought the file into Civil 3d.  After I realized that my scale was completely ridiculous, I downsized about 15 times and used about an 8th of the original pic. 

 

I explored the various methods of rendering the surface in Civil and brought those into 3dsMax to figure out which would be most useful.  After a few adjustments between programs and reducing the number of triangles, I decided to use the TIN surface to create my martian terrain.

       

In 3dsM, I readjusted the scale and made a few small corrections to the form.  In order to get a section of the object, I used the slice tool with offset and extend to create the section line.

        

I adjusted my textures to be more red, yellow, tan…  and added them to my terrain and sky.  I explored the various methods of lighting, but decided that Brad’s ”fake” lighting was the most effective (and less time consuming).  I made a few adjustments to the positions of the lights, the colors of light and the shadows.  I made a separate 3dsM file for rocks and tried using scatter, but it wasn’t working for my large terrain.  Instead of using the scatter function, I decided that I would just create the rocks where I placed my camera(s).   

 

For the illustrations:

The Points = rims and craters, depressions, canyon, plateau, mesa, peaks.  I decided to use a plan view of the contours with significant points outlined.

Line = The TIN surface and contour perspectives express the elevations of the terrain.  I mainly used the TIN with contour lines in red to add emphasis and tone to the slopes.

Surface/Plane = The sections from the sliced 3dsM model show elevation changes as well as add tone to the slopes.

Environment = I used an elongated snapshot from 3dsM to emphasize the expanse of the terrain.