Quote from: TheBadger on July 19, 2013, 08:01:08 PM
hey matt,
Please tell us how you know so much about Mars. I mean, to be able to look at that video and say something about the height of the atmosphere is not exactly common.
Do you know about Mars because of your work on Terragen. Or you started work on Terragen because of your work in some other industry before Planetside? Or is Mars just the manufacturing center for all positronic units in this quadrant? 
Im just curious is all.
Hey Badger,
I've been fascinated by the planets since I was a kid. The outer planets like Jupiter and Saturn are like mini solar systems, so alien and mysterious yet utterly beautiful, and theoretically within our reach in this century if we can pool the resources and motivation to get there. To stand on one of those moons in person (not just a robot with a camera), see the strange-yet-familiar rocky icy landscape, and look up at Jupiter in the sky - that would be something amazing. Mars is always interesting because it is so much like Earth, and yet... it's not Earth. I suppose it has an "uncanny valley" aspect to it. I look at the rocks and the haze and I see the similarities with Earth, and then when it looks too much like Earth I tell myself "no, this is another planet". That is just fascinating to me. And knowing that we can, should be able to get there within my lifetime, that only drew me in more. Well, I don't really feel that way very often these days because Mars has become such a normal thing for us to see on the internet. We see new images regularly and some of the magical anticipation and mystery has gone. But the rate at which we are learning about Mars is accelerating, and the more we know about it the more it becomes a sister planet to Earth. There's a certain feeling of "see? it's just like Earth after all." Scientists apply the same principles of geology and meteorology to studying Mars that they do on Earth, and I find that interesting.
My interest in all this was part of the drive to write Terragen. Making Terragen wasn't just about creating earthly landscapes, although that has its own rewards, but about being able to apply photorealistic rendering and simulation to take an imaginary view of another planet and show it in a way that you are compelled to believe you're actually looking at those places. Whether they are imaginary places in other star systems or real places such as Mars. When I started writing Terragen, there weren't many photos taken from the surface of Mars, or not enough to satisfy the need to explore this place. So I was always interested in rendering Martian landscapes with Vista, then Vista Pro, and later with Terragen as soon as it was capable enough to go beyond Vista Pro. They didn't look as real as the photos, but they showed things that the photos didn't, bigger vistas, a greater sense of being there.
Developing Terragen feeds back into my interest in Mars, I suppose. One of the first *real* planets I rendered with Terragen 2 in 2004 was Mars. I wanted to show what the render engine could do, so I downloaded the MOLA data and implemented the MOLA Map Shader to be able render it. (It's also easier to render Mars than Earth and make it look real!)
Using Terragen gives us some experience and 3D understanding of how real atmospheres look at different altitudes, and more importantly, why they look like that. If you just see a few aerial photos you don't necessarily put the pieces together, but moving about a virtual atmosphere in 3D gives you that understanding. The animation in the link above is of quite a huge piece of terrain, as you can see from the introduction where the rectangle is drawn in the view from orbit. From that I can get a sense of the scale of the animation, and the camera must be pretty high. I think the dust can extend pretty high in the Martian atmosphere but I don't think you'd see as much as the animation shows at this altitude. Perhaps it could represent some high altitude clouds though. They can exist on Mars.
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One thing I picked up right away about this community is the diversity of backgrounds, especially among the self described hobbyists. For just one or two examples, there are people here who work in the medical professions, who also are amateur stargazers, who also enjoy botany! lol How they find the time I have no idea 
I dont find in other 3D forums so many people of so many different professions and walks of life. So I don't think from that, that its an ordinary thing.
Like I was saying, peoples posts here just make me curious, thats all.
Yeah, it's great that we have such a spectrum of interesting, funny, knowledgeable and well-mannered people on here
Matt
