[Walking mars], texturing and lightning a massive terrain and this is how it looks.

Hello Unity fans,
long story short...this is Mars. More specific, this is a small part of the Gale Crater where Curiosity is busy to find some life (or what has been left of it ;-)
It is a project supposed to showcase at a space expo where visitors should be able to walk through the landscape and complete some simple missions. (such as finding water) Visitors can navigate by touching the screen directly.

The nice part about this, the landscape comes in fact from satellite data. So this is not a fictional area.
Beside the awesome Relief terrain package tool, there is no magic involved here. I am just busy adjusting sliders, colors, lights, textures until I get it right. The hardest part however will be, let this app running at least around 40fps with some high quality!

I am trying to keep up a dev blog with some more information, more images and movies. If you like, you may want to visit http://www.mvfusion.nl/tag/mars/
For now; shoot the images with some C&C !
Regards!

 

Wow this looks awesome!

 

now that's terrain! beautiful

 

thnx, I am still figuring out of the details can be much finer...in other words...how far can we push Unity limits to draw a about 10 a 15 km x 12 km terrain...and I prefer that 1 meter would be one polygon.. :-o

 

That terrain looks really awesome! What did you use to create the terrain anyways? Blender?

 

Grazie! I used blender to import the satellite data, but since I have absolute no knowledge of blender, I exported that mesh model to Maya and created a height map which then has been rendered to a 32bit tiff file. That big file is imported in photoshop, sliced up and then exported back as a raw format for Unity. Sounds a bit of a hassle, but this way, I can keep control of the quality and resolution of the maps. With Unity, I used the RTP asset to shade the terrain. Last part is really just reading the docs, trying stuff and tweaking sliders unit it looks right. Most difficult thing is to get all the different surfaces together and render them without any memory crashes and then shade and texture the surface from all different possible angles. (e.g. tweaking one hill perfect could mean that another one doesn't look good anymore and so and so
RT

 

Hello!
I just updated my mars walking project and want to share the new results. Also wondering, if you also thing this changes are improvement or not...I have seeing so many hills and textures right now...if they ever gonna send some people to mars...they better have me on board as well. I know the streets.... ;-)
Anyways...some things have been changed, more specific, the texturing part of it...
if you compare the new images with the top images in my first post, you will notice that the new images are looking much less foily...still, the first image at the first image looks pretty ok, but that is on that angle only...
Also, added some fogs, gameplay adjustments to wrap it up.
Here is a short movie on gameplay...