Eye Of Diespiter - UWR

https://dpsdubaioffice-my.sharepoint.com/:p:/g/personal/d10361_dpsdubai_ae/ER9fUCJsSIVLuqIAxZyMv9EB6rxfJfJV2lVPoEkD0jgamA?e=ng2iRo

https://youtu.be/GP2BNyOJSIE

High-Level Project Summary

We found out that making terrain is a very time consuming process and it can be a huge waste time and energy. So, we developed a way to use pictures captured from JunoCam to make terrain. We get the images captured by JunoCam and desaturate it so that we can use the new image as a height map for making terrain. We can also use this image to mimic a marble texture .This is solving the challenge as we are using the images of Jupiter in an artistic way. This saves a lot of time for game developers and artists as they can create natural looking terrain from readily available pictures. We decided to make an exploration game using the terrain created by the pictures of Jupiter.

Project Development Log:

As we wanted to make an exploration game, we used Unreal Engine 4 to make it.

Here is what we did:

Making The Heightmaps

Our idea was to use the pictures captured by JunoCam to be used as terrain.

Our first challenge was to create a height map for the terrain.

We first got an image of Jupiter captured by JunoCam, we then desaturate so that it becomes greyscale

Next we upscaled the image using an AI based website so that more details are captured

Then we applied some post processing effects like pixilation as we wanted the terrain to look like that of Minecraft's.

Lastly we applied the heightmap to the terrain.

Creating The Lander

We then had to create the lander as the game was space themed and we wanted it to have some elements of Jupiter.

The rover was modelled in Blender and was textured in Substance Painter.

We nicknamed it spider as it looked like a giant mechanical spider.

Brewing Up A Storm

We wanted to make the Giant Red Storm present in Jupiter for our game

So we used Unreal Engines Particle System to make it.

Introducing Beta

In one of our brainstorming sessions we thought of adding a pet to our game to accompany you while you were exploring the game. We first thought of an alien, a 3 eyed dog until we finally settled on a robot which looks like Claptrap from Borderlands 3. It was also modelled in Blender and textured in Substance Painter. We made it so that he follows you around like a small dog.

The End

We then wrapped up our game as it was finally complete

You can play it here: https://krishanth.itch.io/nasa-space-app-game

We used the images from the JunoCam website to create the heightmaps for our project

https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam/processing

Our team was formed as we all joined Unique World Robotics who gave us this opportunity to participate in this competition. At first when we had to choose a challenge we picked Exploring Venus but then we soon realized that it was not possible to create a hardware solution as it would take too much time. We then decided to take the Jovian System topic as it was less specific and it had a lot of room for innovation. Once we thought of the solution for the topic, we wanted to do something extra so we made an entire game using the solution we conjured up. As we had only one week we worked everyday for more than 3 hours until the last day to complete this project but at the end it was finally worth it as we could not believe that we made a game that too in one week. Overall it was an amazing experience and we are looking forward to the next Space Apps Challenge.

• https://www.nasa.gov/solve/feature/junocam​
• https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/overview/index.html​
• https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/open-data/applications.asp​
• https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.26/en-US/RenderingAndGraphics/Materials/Functions/Reference/Particles/​
• https://imgupscaler.com/​
• https://pinetools.com/change-image-saturation​
• https://onlineimagetools.com/pixelate-image​
• https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/​
• https://www.blender.org/​
• https://www.substance3d.com/

#software, #art, #land, #game, #jupiter