raven
Jupiter
That ain't Earth, kiddies.
Posts: 509
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Post by raven on Dec 16, 2011 2:10:12 GMT -4
This is some CGI from 1974. From the university where I taught computer graphics in the mid-1990s. That was state of the art for anyone. If anyone is claiming NASA had some "magical" computer graphics technology in 1969 to render photorealistic images and physically-based animation, then that's just comically wrong. Really, really, really wrong. As an expert, I can categorically state the Apollo film and video was not produced by computer animation. I am not an expert, but I agree. There is something I enjoy about early 3D CGI. Maybe it's the lighting, or maybe it's that you can still count the polygons, the swooping camera movements, or the heavily synthetic synthesiser music, or something else. Many of these people were not artists, they were engineers, yet they created art. It's so very geeky and I love it. But no way could they have created Apollo imagry, video, 16mm DAS, or Hasselblad, at that time. I doubt it could even be created in the nineties, or even in the naughts.
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Post by nomuse on Dec 16, 2011 3:46:16 GMT -4
I knew this claim was bogus from personal observation, but I am a layman in that realm, so thanks to nomuse and JayUtah for saying all those experty words about it. Jay better than me. I've read books by Mr. Doom. He has MET him! (And now John Carmack is flying Armadillos into space from the heart of Texas. Small world, eh?)
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Post by nomuse on Dec 16, 2011 3:51:33 GMT -4
From the university where I taught computer graphics in the mid-1990s. That was state of the art for anyone. If anyone is claiming NASA had some "magical" computer graphics technology in 1969 to render photorealistic images and physically-based animation, then that's just comically wrong. Really, really, really wrong. As an expert, I can categorically state the Apollo film and video was not produced by computer animation. I am not an expert, but I agree. There is something I enjoy about early 3D CGI. Maybe it's the lighting, or maybe it's that you can still count the polygons, the swooping camera movements, or the heavily synthetic synthesiser music, or something else. Many of these people were not artists, they were engineers, yet they created art. It's so very geeky and I love it. But no way could they have created Apollo imagry, video, 16mm DAS, or Hasselblad, at that time. I doubt it could even be created in the nineties, or even in the naughts. My touchstone moment at the moment is from "Apollo 13" (1995). Tom Hanks dreaming he is on the Moon, and picks up a handful of lunar soil. And the moment he pours a little from his hand the illusion shattered in a cloud of, well, dust. That was state of the art for 1995. Although they got a lot of it impressively right. (One of the most informative bits is how they recreated the lighting on the Moon -- the lighting the Apollo Deniers insist was done with some version of Hollywood lighting, multiple fixtures aiming in every direction. And here's Hollywood itself, openly simulating a lunar environment, and do they do anything at all resembling this? No. They use a point source. A crazy contraption of a point source, but still a -- essentially -- single source.)
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Post by Jason Thompson on Dec 16, 2011 5:57:43 GMT -4
And nobody can see any problems in the picture. I doubt that very much. Maybe no-one you've shown it to can, but have you submitted it to an expert at photographic analysis who knows what sort of tell-tale signs to look for? Oh yes they can. The fact that you can fake some pictures and fool your friends in no way undermines the reality of professional photo analysis. Absolute rubbish. Everyone with an ounce of sense knew it was an animation, and anyone who was following the vast amount of news coverage at the time knew why there was animation involved during the landing phase rather than live TV. Find examples. I have seen the film and TV from all the flights, and have not noticed any such thing. Yes, that was intentional. It's called training, and they never made any secret of the fact they did this. It was used to train pilots to recognise lunar surface features around the intended landing site from altitude. It fails as a simulation of the actual surface for faking the moonwalks on in several respects, including colour, surface material, background and scale. It was intended to replicate a portion of the surface as seen from orbit. It was intended to be seen from an aircraft flying at a few thousand feet maximum, and therefore was scaled appropriately to simulate the view from about 60 miles high. The positions of the craters match. The sizes do not.
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Post by tedward on Dec 16, 2011 7:27:34 GMT -4
What is interesting is the whole approach here appears to be based on re writing history. And even then it does not work.
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Post by Tsialkovsky on Dec 16, 2011 11:29:34 GMT -4
It is strange - I was using and teaching computer graphics in early 1970s - later also in the West (after working for NASA) - maybe US military is an old-fasioned governmental body and they did not know anything about such computer technology - but maybe they learnt from commercial products these techniques later.
I told earlier that CAD rendering was not in question (your example videos were such) but possibly transformation of rasterized surfaces of the modules (of course that can be called rendering as well). This is completely different approach. It seems that there are very strong believers here because you continuously missinterpret my sayings.
And I want to repeat this - when was the Apollo picture material published - not in 1969 when some fragmentary pictures and videos were shown (and very poor quality), but only during the Internet years we have seen surprisingly new materials from e.g. Apollo-11 ... and it seems that new materials are still coming out (if you follow the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal). Maybe you should go through the history of Langley and special teams working there.
Somebody was asking about shadows in the 3D pictures. I checked the times of mapping photography taken from Moon orbit using Metric and Panoramic cameras in Apollo-15. They are exactly the same as EVAs. This means that if you prepare a 3D model on top of Panoramic pictures where the shadows are in the moon landscape, the shadows are just correct. I also made CMY analysis of the pictures and found out that the background of the color pictures are B&W (see e.g. AS-17-145-).
If they had wanted to help astronauts to get an impression on the detailed landscape, they should have taken these pictures in earlier Apollo flights - now mapping was done one round too late ... it was not possible to use detailed maps generated in A-15 mission to help "asrtonauts" of A-15 mission - maybe this was an error in numbering the missions.
There is very much false information in even in Wikipedia, NASA pages and everywhere. An example -Somebody mentioned Apollo-13 ... the theories about its unmanned boilerplate have been very interesting. A Soviet spyship took it from French coast as it was dropped down after the launch (US ships were late at place). The net is full of theories how it was a plastic copy and a testing equipment. Funny.
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Post by echnaton on Dec 16, 2011 11:40:08 GMT -4
And I want to repeat this - when was the Apollo picture material published - not in 1969 when some fragmentary pictures and videos were shown (and very poor quality), but only during the Internet years we have seen surprisingly new materials from e.g. Apollo-11 ... and it seems that new materials are still coming out (if you follow the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal). Specifically, which images attributed to the Apollo 11 landing are "new materials" created after 1969? How has the date of creation been determined? Until you answer those questions, nothing you say is worth even considering as true. So why do you refuse?
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Post by twik on Dec 16, 2011 12:19:11 GMT -4
I suspect that Tsialkovsky's reasoning is that that sneaky NASA only started publishing pictures on the internet after the internet was created. Tsialkovsky, can you tell me what sources you looked at for photos available BEFORE the internet? Can you tell us how many were publicly available - not just a guess, a hard number from your research. Just because, say, a Russian layperson couldn't easily access Apollo photos before the internet doesn't mean that they didn't exist. With about 30 seconds googling, I came across this listing from from Brown's University: library.brown.edu/find/Record/b1067744 . Could you comment, from your extensive research (that I assume you have done), on how these books are listed as published in the early 1970s?
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Post by JayUtah on Dec 16, 2011 13:26:11 GMT -4
NASA maintained a number of regional document and data repositories around the United States since the 1960s as part of overall U.S. government document availability policy.
For many years NASA has used a private contractor to handle photo services. You've always been able to get Apollo photos.
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Post by JayUtah on Dec 16, 2011 13:57:21 GMT -4
It is strange - I was using and teaching computer graphics in early 1970s I don't believe you. Irrelevant. The materials have been available publicly since they were released just a few weeks after each mission. Yes, it's called texture-mapping, and it's anachronistic for 1969. Further, early attempts at texture-mapping (i.e., before bump-mapping appeared) are clearly telltale. You may be having difficulty expressing the nuance of your statements in English, but I think the real problem is that you believe you are speaking to novices while you yourself are clearly a novice. That's the layman's perspective. The entire Apollo record has been continuously available since 1969, but it required more than casual interest to want to go find it. Analysis made from a convenience JPEG? Really? Are you serious? Factually false. Apollo 13 practically landed on top of the recovery forces.
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Post by grmcdorman on Dec 16, 2011 14:07:26 GMT -4
Factually false. Apollo 13 practically landed on top of the recovery forces. He's talking about the boilerplate, not the actual A13 capsule. Regardless, speculations about the boilerplate are not evidence.
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Post by twik on Dec 16, 2011 14:17:59 GMT -4
So, how about it, Tsialkovsky? What photos can you show us that are available today that you can PROVE were not available shortly after the missions on which they were taken? Not just a general statement, I would like to see, "Photo #XYZ was taken in 1970, and was not published anywhere until 2005. Here's the evidence for that."
Otherwise, why should I believe you that the photos were not published, rather than you do not comprehend that not online /= not publicly available?
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Post by JayUtah on Dec 16, 2011 14:37:08 GMT -4
He's talking about the boilerplate, not the actual A13 capsule. Regardless, speculations about the boilerplate are not evidence. Yes, of course -- my mistake. The Soviets indeed recovered an Apollo boilerplate spacecraft. However a boilerplate is not the full spacecraft; it is meant only to mimic certain aspects of it for training and development purposes. Hence if BP-1227 doesn't have everything on it that a real CM would, it's to be expected.
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Post by nomuse on Dec 16, 2011 14:59:15 GMT -4
It is strange - I was using and teaching computer graphics in early 1970s - later also in the West (after working for NASA) - maybe US military is an old-fasioned governmental body and they did not know anything about such computer technology - but maybe they learnt from commercial products these techniques later. I told earlier that CAD rendering was not in question (your example videos were such) but possibly transformation of rasterized surfaces of the modules (of course that can be called rendering as well). This is completely different approach. It seems that there are very strong believers here because you continuously missinterpret my sayings. Or you aren't being sufficiently clear to cross the barrier between different languages and different terminologies. And I want to repeat this - when was the Apollo picture material published - not in 1969 when some fragmentary pictures and videos were shown (and very poor quality), but only during the Internet years we have seen surprisingly new materials from e.g. Apollo-11 ... and it seems that new materials are still coming out (if you follow the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal). Maybe you should go through the history of Langley and special teams working there. I have two prints given to me while the flights were going on. This was not uncommon for my generation. I will agree that the quality of the scans and translations is improving, and there is better access to the margins; to shots that were duplicates or from the end of rolls or otherwise not considered worth spending a lot of time making widely accessible. But the larger volume of the material has been available for decades, in sufficient quality to rule out simple fakery. Somebody was asking about shadows in the 3D pictures. I checked the times of mapping photography taken from Moon orbit using Metric and Panoramic cameras in Apollo-15. They are exactly the same as EVAs. This means that if you prepare a 3D model on top of Panoramic pictures where the shadows are in the moon landscape, the shadows are just correct. I also made CMY analysis of the pictures and found out that the background of the color pictures are B&W (see e.g. AS-17-145-). Over here we call that "baked in" lighting. Yes, it could be worked with. It means first off that your choices are not arbitrary; you can't simply set up whatever scene you desire. It means more subtly that you have to be quite careful matching any rendered lighting effects. And when you combine this with the texture stretch and interpolation arising from the combination of relief and a camera angle quite orthogonal to the texture source, this basically means one more thing you've got to clean up by hand. If they had wanted to help astronauts to get an impression on the detailed landscape, they should have taken these pictures in earlier Apollo flights - now mapping was done one round too late ... it was not possible to use detailed maps generated in A-15 mission to help "asrtonauts" of A-15 mission - maybe this was an error in numbering the missions. There is very much false information in even in Wikipedia, NASA pages and everywhere. An example -Somebody mentioned Apollo-13 ... the theories about its unmanned boilerplate have been very interesting. A Soviet spyship took it from French coast as it was dropped down after the launch (US ships were late at place). The net is full of theories how it was a plastic copy and a testing equipment. Funny. That would be the job of Lunar Orbiter. Although the CSM would overfly the landing zone before the LM landed, the film it shot would not in any way be available until after the return to Earth. But you haven't been suggesting this. You've been suggesting rather specifically that satellite sets of various eras (I used Clementine-based images for my whole-Moon renders) were used to construct via 3d graphics techniques convincing fake imagery for Apollo.
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Post by Tsialkovsky on Dec 16, 2011 16:11:18 GMT -4
The idea of Google Earth is very old - from 1970s. Then mostly architects designing buildings used this method. They had to digitize topographic map - take an aerial photograph, tilt it 90 degrees and then take pictures from ground to show trees and buildings and fix it to the xyz-coordinates of the topomap. Then they had designed a new buiding separately ... or they had a miniatyr model of the building. This was then transferred to the image. For me to prepare Apollo kind of pictures would take 1 day per flight (I just need LM and space suits). The only problem is that there seems to be also pictures taken from Moon surface from AS 15-17 (probably by robot cameras). For example, the huge stones at Hadley Rim walls seem to be real and too detailed for Panoramic camera.
The moon picture books published in early 1970s were either Disney kind of books with very bad quality pics (from a gravel pit and some with lamp lightning - some from Langley flight simulator) or geological books where only Metric/Panoramic camera pictures were used. Apollo was a Moon mapping mission - very good topographic maps were generated ... and at least the latest missions took pictures also from surface (without men).
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