From Universe Today

The videos are created using actual, high-resolution data from the HiRISE camera – DEM (Digital Elevation Model)- also known as DTM Digital Terrain Model files.

“The videos were produced using software I originally designed to visualize the MOLA data in 2001,” Adrian said. “The software, called Mars Explorer, is a real-time rendering engine for visualizing 3D terrain data interactively.”

Adrian said the Mars Explorer software renders at about 60 frames per second on a PC with a moderately powerful graphics card when not outputting video. “When creating videos it runs at about one tenth of that speed. The 4 minute 50 second Candor Chasma video took about half an hour to generate,” he said. “The software requires the elevation and image data in raw binary format so I first have to pre-process the HiRISE DTM and image data into this format. This process takes about an hour.

One of my favorites is one Adrian created of flying through Gale Crater, above, which includes the sun in the sky and even “glare” of the sun off the “lens” of your camera (or the windshield on your Mars hovercraft! – the sun and glare can also be seen in the Olympus Mons video, top). But he says the earlier videos he created, such as the Gale crater animation, did not utilize the full image resolution that he now has by making his software more memory efficient. “I can now use the data at its full resolution,” he said. “I have to crop some of the larger datasets such as the Mojave crater DTM because they require more system RAM than I currently have.”

About the sun and glare, Adrian said, “The shadows in the Gale crater animation do not correspond correctly to the position of the sun. The sun should be to the left and possibly higher. The sun glare is an effect I programmed that brightens the whole screen by an amount depending on the angle between the sun and view direction.”

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