Uploaded March 2021 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
The goal when this is done is for the VR user to be able stage and launch Ingenuity for either a programmed flight, or to modes of user control: Through eyes of Perseverance's MastCAM-Z for standard "drone" like flight, or "FPV" mode through downlooking cameras, which is what Ingenuity will use to "map" its path. Currently it will be optimized for the desktop with a "lite" version for the Oculus Quest 2 in standalone mode.
In creating the version of the craft for Unreal Engine, we broke apart the NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration #Perseverance & #Ingenuity to provide some articulation in the camera and rotors. We also redid the models UV and textures for only one "super" texture for PBR to improve VR performance. The goal is to provide a series of movable components to perform tasks that you program the rover to stage the initial launch of Ingenuity. (You will notice both the rotors and MastCAM structure move in this video)
The terrain is based off of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) earlier images downloaded from Astropedia in 25cm orthographic image and 1m height map in their proprietary HiRISE DTM Mosaic which we scaled up to match the 25cm orthographic image creating whopping 400GB image, which we immediately cropped down to a more manageable 64K x 64K area, that will be brought into UE as for quadrant 16K x 16K UDIM texture. For this demo video, we only imported one 16K quadrant with special terrain derived from the height map of the same 16K quadrant. The next step is to create a very high resolution terrain based on photogrammetry the surface around the rover, along with particles generation for shifting sand.
The lighting is based on cubemap created from the an earlier 8K 360 I modified from the actual 360 from JPL.
More to come...
The goal when this is done is for the VR user to be able stage and launch Ingenuity for either a programmed flight, or to modes of user control: Through eyes of Perseverance's MastCAM-Z for standard "drone" like flight, or "FPV" mode through downlooking cameras, which is what Ingenuity will use to "map" its path. Currently it will be optimized for the desktop with a "lite" version for the Oculus Quest 2 in standalone mode.
In creating the version of the craft for Unreal Engine, we broke apart the NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration #Perseverance & #Ingenuity to provide some articulation in the camera and rotors. We also redid the models UV and textures for only one "super" texture for PBR to improve VR performance. The goal is to provide a series of movable components to perform tasks that you program the rover to stage the initial launch of Ingenuity. (You will notice both the rotors and MastCAM structure move in this video)
The terrain is based off of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) earlier images downloaded from Astropedia in 25cm orthographic image and 1m height map in their proprietary HiRISE DTM Mosaic which we scaled up to match the 25cm orthographic image creating whopping 400GB image, which we immediately cropped down to a more manageable 64K x 64K area, that will be brought into UE as for quadrant 16K x 16K UDIM texture. For this demo video, we only imported one 16K quadrant with special terrain derived from the height map of the same 16K quadrant. The next step is to create a very high resolution terrain based on photogrammetry the surface around the rover, along with particles generation for shifting sand.
The lighting is based on cubemap created from the an earlier 8K 360 I modified from the actual 360 from JPL.
More to come...
