Lunar Explorer and Planet Builder Technology

Beau Albiston
September 28, 2005

Go here to see screen shots of Lunar Explorer.
Go here to purchase Lunar Explorer.

Current technology features of Planet Builder:

Factor-of-two level-of-detail (LOD) steps resulting in nearly zero transitional artifacts (most other technologies have factor-of-four texture LOD jumps).
Multi-resolution support for basic data types: imagery, terrain/elevation, vector, d-information, and custom.
Efficient spherical tiling method that renders polar areas without distortion.
Custom data processing support.
Datasets can be rendered independently.
Image data sources are efficiently compressed for minimal storage footprint.
Image data sources are decompressed quickly at run-time using consumer graphics hardware (supports DXT).
Data sources are further compressed using lossless compression (supports LZMA).
Real-time rendering of planetary-sized data sources (no limit to data source size).
Continuous level-of-detail.
Data source tiles may be efficiently paged from disk, over a network (Internet), or any other similar system.
Data source tile request pipeline designed for optimal I/O performance resulting in minimal disk accesses.
Asynchronous planetary texture optimization. Process is independent of main application thread and is able to handle streaming over a poor Internet connection.
Planetary mesh optimization is performed in “chunks” to reduce “think” time and to take advantage of graphics hardware batching efficiency.
Flat or spherical globe rendering.
Planetary mesh optimization tessellation control.

Features to be completed:

Available datasets:

Moon - Global detail: 500 m/pixel terrain, 100 m/pixel imagery (includes grey scale, enhanced (near-natural) color, and color ratio (of geological interest). Custom terrain and imagery data sets for Apollo landing sites at ~10 m resolution (created from photographic and global data reference). ~100 m/sample elevation and texture data of Tycho crater and surrounding area. Source data size is greater then 100 GB. Objects from Apollo, Luna, and other missions are realistically modeled and textured.
Mars - TBD...

Lunar object list (3D models, including textures):

Screen shot #1.