Animator ‘sees’ Mars in dunes of Qatar (11/10/2005)

Animator ‘sees’ Mars in dunes of Qatar

By Bonnie James DAN Maas, the Emmy Award nominated creator of the stunningly realistic three-dimensional (3D) animations about the current Mars Exploration Rovers (MERs), may very well be looking at images of sand dunes from Qatar’s Inland Sea area while working on any future project on Mars. “What surprised me constantly while driving around the Inland Sea was how much it looks like Mars and it almost felt like I was on another planet,” the 24-year old, who has taken visualisation in planetary exploration to unprecedented heights, told Gulf Times in an interview. Maas, who entered Cornell University in the US at 16, having skipped the last two years of high school on account of his academic brilliance, and graduated at the top of his class three years later, was in Doha over the weekend on his first ever visit to the Middle East. “The Martian dunes are in fact of the same shape of those at Inland Sea, they form into a kind of crescent shape when wind pushes them along,” observed the founder, CEO and president of Maas Digital, who captured on film several frames of sand dunes from Qatar for his collection of reference materials. Maas finds it very valuable to look at photographs related to his projects as they help him to give accurate and realistic renditions in his animation films. “I am taking some of images sent by the MER to create 3D terrain for my 12 minutes of animation in a 40 minute IMAX film on the MER mission, being produced by Disney and directed by well-known documentary maker George Butler for a January 2006 launch,” he said. It is estimated that at least 100mn people have seen Maas’s animations that gave the world an idea of how the Martian environment would look like even before the first rover, Spirit, entered the Martian atmosphere in January 3, 2004. The young achiever gave the first ever screening in Qatar of his nine-minute Mars Rover 2003 animation video, created as part of Cornell’s Athena MER Programme, on Sunday at Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar, where he accompanied his father Dr James B Maas, the noted Cornell professor of psychology. The video begins with the flame-bathed launch of a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral and shows the spacecraft embarking on its seven-month voyage to Mars, and then dissolves to the spectacular airbag-bouncing landing, something no human eye has actually seen. Scenes of the spacecraft righting itself and opening, and the MER slowly unfolding and beginning to roll across the bleak reddish landscape, collecting rock and soil samples; all these are shown in dramatic detail with a high level of photo-realism, without even a single frame of actual photography being involved. “When the Rovers landed and sent back the first pictures of Martian terrain, I was very surprised and happy to see that my animation came very close to what it really looked like,” Maas replied when asked how similar his film proved to be to the actual footage from Mars. Maas, commissioned by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa), to make the video for its two MER launches, began creating simulations of the MER in 1998 while he was still an undergraduate. The animation expert, who had always wanted to try applying Hollywood techniques to real-life space exploration, has been producing digital animations since he was 10, some of his early work including Star Wars-style space battles. His interest in film goes back even farther, largely because his father is also a decorated documentary filmmaker. While still in high school, junior Maas started his own company to provide animations for television commercials. As an elementary student, he recalls really enjoying Math and Science classes. Maas, who likes using Math to describe and understand the world, substantiates that in fact the essence of computer graphics is simulating reality with Math and Physics. For the Mars video, Maas worked closely with Steven Squyres, a Cornell professor of astronomy and principal investigator for the Athena science package carried by the two Rovers. Maas used a wealth of material, accrued from conversations with Squyres and engineers, blueprints, images from Nasa’s Website, to create his computer-generated images. He also visited the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in Pasadena, California, to talk to the engineers managing the MER mission. Beginning each video by hand-sketching a storyboard, with each panel depicting a specific scene from the Mars mission, he used a computer-aided design programme and blueprints provided by JPL to construct a virtual, 3D model of the Rover. The model is actually a mathematical description from which a computer can construct an image of the machine as seen from any direction. Just as in hand-drawn animation, digitised sequences are composites of separately constructed background and moving images. The final step is rendering, the process that adds realistic lighting and shadows, to the nearly 12,000 individual frames of animation that make up the finished video. The software even simulates lens flare (the bright flash caused when a camera briefly looks toward the sun) and film grain. Maas did all his work by himself in his Ithaca office on an array of PCs. He wrote custom code to augment off-the-shelf programmes for the MER video. They included a programme that renders accurate star fields using a Nasa star database, a high-dynamic-range compositing system that provides better color resolution than any commercially available compositor and a server that automatically co-ordinates rendering on his network of computers. Besides Nasa, Maas is working with Ecliptic Enterprises, which makes the rocket cam system, used on the last couple of space shuttle launches, and provided exterior views from the side of the shuttle. “This company is making more of these systems to put on real space crafts and I am consulting with them on how to present their video to the world through effective editing,” he said. Maas has done projects for the Public Broadcasting Service Nova series and created a simulated space station and Mars colony for the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World. Discovery Channel International and The Ohio Aerospace Institute are his other clients.  Time magazine ran three two-page spreads on Maas’s Mars animations whereas the National Geographic printed a two-page spread. His image of the Rover is painted on the Delta II rockets that sent the real Rovers into space. Maas, currently planning on a long vacation to Hong Kong, Singapore and China (he has learnt Chinese in college), added he would love to return to Qatar for a more leisurely exploration of the country.