Animating DTM Data from Mars

When we learned that there is free DTM data of mars available from Nasa, we wanted to do something with it. So here is what we did.

First we downloaded DTM data of the Alluvial Fan in Arabia Terra region from here.  The Lunar & Planetary Laboratory also has a howto page that explains how you can interact with the DTM data in their IMG format. They recommend Blender as a 3d modelling tool, because it has a HiRISE plugin for reading DTM data. Since we are more familiar with cinema4d we used blender just to read the data and export it as an wavefront object file. Here is what the mars region looked like after we imported it into cinema4d and scaled it a bit:

Next we needed some textures. There are ways in cinema4d to create a texture that reflects the height of the object, but lucky for us the people from Lunar & Planetary Laboratory already did that. In addition to the DTM data they offer height heat maps for download. Here is what the height heat map for Alluvial Fan in Arabia Terra looks like:

We cut out and rotated the heat map using gimp and imported it as a texture into cinema4d. After applying it to the model we created a short animation where our camera flys over mars and gives us a nice tour of the region. Here is our animation on youtube:

This project was in part inspired by this tutorial. In the tutorial they use DEM data from earth and add some cool looking pins & paths to their animation. Also they use After Effects to finish their animation, which we didn't use because we currently have no experience with it. (Much to learn we have.)