Development of virtual morphometric globes using Blender

TL;DR

This paper presents the development of virtual morphometric globes for Earth, Mars, and the Moon using Blender, enabling interactive visualization of planetary topography and morphometric attributes for geoscience research.

Contribution

It introduces a novel system for creating interactive 3D globes with morphometric data for multiple planets using open-source Blender software.

Findings

System demonstrates good performance in real-time visualization.

Morphometric globes effectively display planetary topography features.

The approach is applicable to various planetary bodies.

Abstract

Virtual globes - programs implementing interactive three-dimensional (3D) models of planets - are increasingly used in geosciences. Global morphometric models can be useful for tectonic and planetary studies. We describe the development of the first testing version of the system of virtual morphometric globes for the Earth, Mars, and the Moon. As the initial data, we used three 15'-gridded global digital elevation models (DEMs) extracted from SRTM30_PLUS, the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter, and the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter gridded archives. For three planetary bodies, we derived global digital models and maps of several morphometric attributes (i.e., horizontal curvature, vertical curvature, minimal curvature, maximal curvature, and catchment area). To develop the system, we used Blender, the open-source software for 3D modeling and visualization. First, a 3D sphere model was generated. Second, the global morphometric maps as textures were imposed to the sphere surface. Finally, the real-time 3D graphics Blender engine was used to implement globe rotation and zooming. The testing of the developed system demonstrated its good performance. Morphometric globes clearly represent peculiarities of planetary topography, according to the physical and mathematical sense of a particular morphometric variable.