Adeptus Mechanicus - Space Apps Challenge

Adeptus Mechanicus| Putting the 'Art' in Artemis

Putting the 'Art' in Artemis

Your challenge is to create an artistic work to communicate, inform, or inspire others about humanity's road to Mars. Your art may be in any form, including (but not limited to): drawing, painting, sculpture, computer generated 2D or 3D, music, film, music video, written or spoken word, dance, and textile.

Et Ares.

Summary

Mission Artemis: one could say it's humanity's cradle to Luna. But as we continue to march through time, embracing deterrents that come our way, we must, nay, it is our duty to ask, what lies beyond and when will we get there? That's where we come in.To elucidate this hope of the human spirit, we present a short film — Et Ares — to showcase the awe, and often terror, inspiring features of Mars, and collective transcendental human aspirations towards this marvel. "Et Ares", the title itself translates to "And Mars", signifying in addition to our forthcoming plans for lunar occupation, we cannot forget our planetary neighbour - The Red Planet!

How We Addressed This Challenge

We've made a short film, with various scenes showing the different aspects of Mars, from visiting the planet, to stepping foot on it for the first time, as well as a rendering of a possible (and hopefully likely) future.

At a very uncertain time such as now, costs for outer space pursuits need to be justified passionately, to sustain the belief of people in the virtues of space exploration. This short film aims to help by reintroducing Mars as a prospective future in public imagination, reminding then why we chose to go exploring beyond into unknown realms in the first place. For curiosity. For scientific development. But beyond all else, as a natural extension of the yearning of our human spirit to seek out where we have never ventured before.

On the prudential side, despite our ardent efforts, we cannot ignore the possibility that our planet could soon turn desolate, and we must be ready to spread across the solar system, and Mars is the first viable site for large scale habitation. The video concludes by showing how we must be willing, and prepared, to terraform Mars to make it Earthlike, and never repeat the mistakes it took to get us here in the first place.

How We Developed This Project

Team & Working

Unlike many high school teams, we were a team founded on a common vision which we all shared deeply, rather than the other way around. We collaborated and kept updated about our work on Discord, an efficient and fast platform for communication. We undertook different parts ourselves but rather than working on the parts in isolation, we supported each other while giving suggestions and reviewing work, so we could cultivate our common vision to be the best it could be. We were inspired by the stylized planets by Aidy Burrows and Gleb Alexandrov.

Software & Hardware

We used Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects for compiling the video clips and touching them up, Blender, the largest open source 3D generalist software for 3D modelling, sculpting and rendering, taking help from NASA 3D resources, and the GSuite to plan out our progress, using Google Docs, Slides, and Drive. Ableton Digital Audio Workstation was used to create the audio that has been used in the short film, which incorporated clips from NASA Audio resources.

As video renderings, and especially 3D ray-tracing applications tend to be extremely compute intensive, we had to spend a lot of effort gathering compute resources, as it is needed for processing the large amounts of data that is created which we needed to use in a short timeframe. Intel i5 and i7 CPUs, as well as GTX and RTX GPUs by nVidia, helped in producing our content. It became quite hectic to manage and coordinate across machines and project files and ideas.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

Imaging

We used elevation & color imaging data of Mars, collected by various NASA missions, for a realistic depiction of the surface of the planet in 3D software. Color data acted as an albedo map for the surface, whereas elevation data helped elucidate surface details and form. Similar data for the Earth's surface was also put into use in a scene of the video. The data was extremely high-quality, and it would've been near-impossible to come up with a believable visualization of the planet surface without it accumulated, much less a realistic one.

Models & Audio

We used 3D models of satellites in orbit around Mars, made up of the aforementioned textures, and detailed Martian terrain data and landing sites for the Martian surface, all of which were sourced from the NASA 3D resources. A model of the ISS from the NASA 3D Resources was also used to develop our own orbital station in the video, which we refitted and modified. The 3D models helped us to maintain scientific credibility and give form to our depictions by facilitating the development of our vision for the project.

Additionally, we are using some portions of NASA audio data of various kinds in our soundtrack. The audio helped to reinforce the transcendental experience that the video intended to portray onto the audience, and the audio data used was the backbone to the experience.