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Mars Exploration Rover (MER) after
unfolding on Mars.
Blast-off screen from Mars Rover
animation.
Lightwave scene of panel detachment
midflight.
Image Credits: Maas
Digital LLC © 2002 Cornell University
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Daniel Maas operates his own company, which specializes
in visualization and commercial work. His Mars Rover visualizations
have won him worldwide acclaim, having been featured in prime-time
news broadcasts, Time Magazine, and the Discovery Channel. Maas
became involved in the Mars Exploration Project thanks to a combination
of lifelong passions for space and computer animation. “I've
been a space nut since I was a little kid,“ he explains. “I
loved films and shows like Star Wars, Star Trek, and Babylon 5,
and I read tons of space books.“
That interest has only increased for Maas as his career moved
through roles such as working with graphics for television productions
and in computer animation. Being asked to work on visualization
for the Mars Exploration Project, Maas was thrilled to have a chance
to “apply Hollywood-quality techniques to a real space mission.“
While taking a class on space at Cornell University, taught by
Professor Steve Squyres, head of the science team for NASA's Mars
Rover mission, Maas showed Squyres a demo animation he’d
created of the Delta II rocket which launches Mars missions. Squyres
and his NASA colleagues were extremely impressed with the effect,
finding it difficult to believe it was not real footage. A short
time later Maas was working for the Mars Exploration Project to
create a full-length animation of their Mars mission, from the
launch at Cape Canaveral, Florida to the landing on Mars and exploration
thereof.
Apart from being broadcast extensively around the world when Spirit
landed on Mars, the Mars Rover Animation featured in various documentaries
about NASA’s work on Mars.
View the Mars Rover Animation:
www.maasdigital.com/gallery.html
One of the toughest challenges Maas faced was to simulate the
actual mission with enough realism so that the audience could ‘suspend
disbelief’ and feel like they were riding along with the
Mars Rover. Each shot had to be visually interesting, yet accurate
and true enough to the plans and calculations of the actual mission
to satisfy rocket scientists. Key components which assisted in
this regard were the high-resolution models of the spacecraft and
realistic Earth and Mars environments.
“Real NASA spacecraft are covered with wires and bolts,
and you really need to model as many of those as possible to make
convincing images,“ explains Maas. “I spent two months
working on the rover alone. The background environments make use
of pretty much every trick I could think of, from straight photographs
for the launch pad environs to hand-painted textures on real topography,
for Mars.“ |
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