Ingenuity's 9th Flight

3D Model

Actual 3D terrain based upon a unique workflow to take Ingenuity’s NAVCAM & RTE images to create a section of the 625m flight path.

The 3D terrain was created by piping the 100+ images taken by the NAVCAM camera at 640x480, scaled to 1280x960, then running it in ‘Reality Capture’ & Apple’s ‘Object Capture’ photogrammetry tools to create the terrain. Sadly, NASA JPL has not offered actual lens data so there was an accumulated curvature error that had to be corrected in Blender. I chose Apple’s Object Capture since it does a better job of creating a decent mesh size as well as 8K textures for diffuse, roughness, AO, & normals. This was brought into Blender 3.0 Alpha w. CycleX to create the initial animations seen on Twitter (All Things 3D). I then used Adobe PS to create an orthographic texture from the 3rd 4K image taken by the RTE camera, which after cropping left me a decent 3K texture that I could project onto the terrain using the current low res texture as a guide. Finally sectioned, reUVed & baked.