High-Level Project Summary
We are developing a virtual environment of mars using a panoramic image of the planet that was taken by Nasa's curiosity rover.The setting will be taken after the time when humans start colonising mars. All the structures that will be used in the mission are represented accurately . We also made some tools that can be used for sample collection.This project can be used in educational institutions to provide students with the ability to visualise how Mars will be developed and how the environment looks like in general, which will encourage them to research more and get knowledge about space. Project can be more developed and can be used in training astronaut with the help of VR technology.
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
What does our project do?
Our project can be used to to visualise the future colonised mars or how mars looks like in general.
It works on Unreal Engine 4.27.
We made some models on our own and mostly used NASA's 3D models. For environment textures we used Quixel Bridge which is a free asset providing software. The project includes Habitation Module Unit, portable rocket launcher, Greenhouse and some tools which is our own idea (only demonstration) that can be used for sample collection in the upcoming mars mission. The surrounding is made by a real panoramic image of Mars which was shot by Curiosity Rover.
Tools
1.Rake with Scoop
This is a tool which will be used to collect specific samples like same size of stones/pebbles. The scoop will be use to shove inside ground and the rake will be used as filter to collect only same size of sample pebbles. This tool can be further developed with different sizes of rake for different size of sample.
2.Portable ChemCam
Portable ChemCam will be used to analyze the chemical and mineral composition of stones and surface. ChemCam fires a laser and analyzes the elemental composition of vaporized materials from areas smaller than 1 millimeter on the surface of Martian rocks and soils. The inbuilt spectrograph will be used to provide details about the minerals and chemical present inside it which can be further used as a data to start mining.
How does the project Works?
The project works as a simulator which accurately represents the surrounding of mars. We control a third person character which is movable around the project environment.
(In game image)
What Benefits does it have?
The project can be used in schools and colleges to provide students the ability to visualise the Martian Surface. Especially for school kids, it's beneficiary as there is not much taught about space and this will expand their imagination power and their hunger for knowing more about space.
If further developed, we can add VR technology which can be used in Astronaut Training so that they can get to know about what difficulties they can face.
What do we hope to achieve?
As currently this project is just a demo and not a full fledged simulator, we really hope that we can make this project real and provide schools and even colleges with it so that they can make a good use out of it. We want this project to go open source so that we can expand this project by adding different planets of solar system and even outside the boundary of it.
We also want to make this project VR supported so it can be used in training astronauts about the difficulties in manned missions or space in general.
What tools we used to make this?
We used Unreal Engine 4.27 to make this project, and instead of programming language we used visual scripting with the help of unreal engine's blueprint technology(the links will be provided below).
The surrounding is made by a real panoramic image of Mars which was taken by Curiosity Rover.
The structure models are all taken from NASA's official website.
The environmental mesh like stones and rubble was downloaded from Quixel Bridge which is available with Unreal Engine.
The sample collecting tools and the green house is made in Maya (a 3d modelling software).
Space Agency Data
In our project, most of the things are made with the use of Space Agency Data only.
The 3D background/surrounding is nothing but a 360 degree panoramic view of a real mars image that was taken by the Curiosity Rover.
Every structure like Habitation Module, Portable Launcher, Transportation Rover are all taken from official NASA's 3D resources website(The link will be provided below).
Hackathon Journey
As we are first years and this was our first hackathon, we explored as much as we wanted and tried everything to find our niche for our future projects. We just wanted to experience how the things happen in a hackathon and now that we are taking part in it,
-we learnt how to do team work and find a suitable role for each person.
-we learnt how to work with unreal engine as this was our first time working with it.
-we learnt how to do research.
-we learnt more about NASA and other space agencies.
-we learnt about Mars Mission and what is going into it.
(below is the image of the development phase of the game)
Our previous work in game development with Unity Engine inspired us to make this project real as we already knew the basics of a Game Engine and Modelling.
We first made the surrounding with the Mars image by Curiosity Rover into 3d environment --> We downloaded and made some models that we needed and placed them in the environment --> We scripted the player movements and some other Funtionalities
When we faced a challenge we focused on what we can do instead of we could not because the time was short and we had to complete what we can.
We would like to thank
-our Team for coming together and helping each other because that's what a team does.
-NASA for providing such a wonderful variety of 3D models for free.
-Unreal Engine for giving us such a premium engine for free.
References
NASA's 3D Models: https://nasa3d.arc.nasa.gov/models
NASA's curiosity rover Mars Image: https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/curiositys-1-8-billion-pixel-panorama/?site=msl
ChemCam: https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/spacecraft/instruments/chemcam/
Mars Environment Assets for stones and rubble: https://quixel.com/bridge
Visual Scripting: https://github.com/SHAY2407/Virtual-Mars
Tags
#Artemis, #Mars, #CuriosityRover, #Space, #Game, #SpaceQuest, #NASA, #Simulation
Global Judging
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.