For quite some time now, Marlin has been the firmware of choice for any kind of custom 3D printer, with only Klipper offering some serious competition in the open-source world. …read more

IntroductionHello! My name is Denys. I was born and raised in Nigeria, where I'm currently based. I began my journey into 3D art in March 2022, teaching myself through online resources, starting, of course, with the iconic donut tutorial on YouTube. Since then, I've continued to grow my skills independently, and now I'm working toward a career in 3D generalism, with a particular interest in environment art.I originally got into Blender because SketchUp wasn't free, and I could not keep up with the subscriptions. While searching for alternatives, I came across Blender. That's when I realized I had installed it once years ago, but back then, the interface completely intimidated me, and I gave up on it. This time, though, I decided to stick with it – and I'm glad I did.I started out creating simple models. One of my first big projects was modeling the entire SpongeBob crew. That led to my first animation, and eventually, the first four episodes of a short animated series (though it's still incomplete). As I grew more confident, I began participating in online 3D competitions, like cgandwe, where I focused on designing realistic environments. Those experiences have played a huge role in getting me to where I am today.Getting Started Before starting any scene, I always look for references. It might not be the most original approach, but it's what works best for me. One piece that inspired me was a beautiful artwork by Calder Moore. I bookmarked it as soon as I saw it back in 2023, and luckily, I finally found the time to bring it to life last month.BlockoutThe goal was to match the original camera angle and roughly model the main frame of the structures. It wasn't perfect, but modeling and placing the lower docks helped me get the perspective right. Then I moved on to modeling and positioning the major structures in the scene.I gave myself two weeks to complete this project. And as much as I enjoy modeling, I also enjoy not modeling, so I turned to asset kits and free models to help speed things up. I came across an awesome paid kit by Bigmediumsmall and instantly knew it would fit perfectly into my scene.I also downloaded a few models from Sketchfab, including a lamp, desk console, freighter controls, and a robotic arm, which I later took apart to add extra detail. Another incredibly helpful tool was the Random Flow add-on by BlenderGuppy, which made adding sci-fi elements much easier. Lastly, I pulled in some models from my older sci-fi and cyberpunk projects to round things out.Kitbashing Once I had the overall shape I was aiming for, I moved on to kitbashing to pack in as much detail as possible. There wasn't any strict method to the madness; I simply picked assets I liked, whether it was a set of pipes, vents, or even a random shape that just worked in the sci-fi context. I focused first on kitbashing the front structure, and used the Random Flow add-on to fill in areas where I didn't kitbash manually. Then I moved on to the other collections, following the same process.The freighter was the final piece of the puzzle, and I knew it was going to be a challenge. Part of me wanted to model it entirely from scratch, but the more practical side knew I could save a lot of time by sticking with my usual method. So I modeled the main shapes myself, then kitbashed the details to bring it to life. I also grabbed some crates from Sketchfab to fill out the scene.Texturing This part was easily my favorite, and there was no shortcut here. I had to meticulously create each material myself. Well, I did use PBR materials downloaded from CGAmbient as a base, but I spent a lot of time tweaking and editing them to get everything just right.Texturing has always been my favorite stage when building scenes like this. Many artists prefer external tools like Substance 3D Painter (which I did use for some of the models), but I've learned so much about procedural texturing, especially from RyanKingArt, that I couldn't let it go. It's such a flexible and rewarding approach, and I love pushing it as far as I can.I wanted most of the colors in the scene to be dark, but I did keep the original color of the pipes and the pillars, just to add a little bit of vibrance to the scene. I also wanted the overall texture to be very rough and grungy. One of the biggest helps in achieving this was using the Grunge Maps from Substance 3D Painter. I found a way to extract them into Blender, and it helped.A major tool during the texturing phase was Jsplacement, which I used to procedurally generate sci-fi grids and plates. This was the icing on the cake for adding intricate details. Whenever an area felt too flat, I applied bump maps with these grids and panels to bring the materials to life. For example, both the lamp pole and the entire black metal material feature these Jsplacement Maps.Lighting For this, I didn't do anything fancy. I knew the scene was in a high altitude, so I looked for HDRI with a cloudless sky, and I boosted the saturation up a little to give it that high altitude look.Post-Production The rendering phase was challenging since I was working on a low-end laptop. I couldn't render the entire scene all at once, so I broke it down by collections and rendered them as separate layers. Then, I composited the layers together in post-production. I'm not big on heavy post-work, so I kept it simple, mostly tweaking brightness and saturation on my phone. That's about it for the post-production process.Conclusion The entire project took me 10 days to complete, working at least four hours each day. Although I've expressed my love for texturing, my favorite part of this project was the detailing and kitbashing. I really enjoyed piecing all the small details together. The most challenging part was deciding which assets to use and where to place them. I had a lot of greebles to choose from, but I'm happy with the ones I selected; they felt like a perfect fit for the scene.I know kitbashing sometimes gets a negative reputation in the 3D community, but I found it incredibly relieving. Honestly, this project wouldn't have come together without it, so I fully embraced the process.I'm excited to keep making projects like this. The world of 3D art is truly an endless and vast realm, and I encourage every artist like me to keep exploring it, one project at a time.Denys Molokwu, 3D Artist

Donald Trump’s military parade in Washington this weekend — a show of force in the capital that just happens to take place on the president’s birthday — smacks of authoritarian Dear Leader-style politics (even though Trump actually got the idea after attending the 2017 Bastille Day parade in Paris).Yet as disconcerting as the imagery of tanks rolling down Constitution Avenue will be, it’s not even close to Trump’s most insidious assault on the US military’s historic and democratically essential nonpartisan ethos.In fact, it’s not even the most worrying thing he’s done this week.On Tuesday, the president gave a speech at Fort Bragg, an Army base home to Special Operations Command. While presidential speeches to soldiers are not uncommon — rows of uniformed troops make a great backdrop for a foreign policy speech — they generally avoid overt partisan attacks and campaign-style rhetoric. The soldiers, for their part, are expected to be studiously neutral, laughing at jokes and such, but remaining fully impassive during any policy conversation.That’s not what happened at Fort Bragg. Trump’s speech was a partisan tirade that targeted “radical left” opponents ranging from Joe Biden to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. He celebrated his deployment of Marines to Los Angeles, proposed jailing people for burning the American flag, and called on soldiers to be “aggressive” toward the protesters they encountered.The soldiers, for their part, cheered Trump and booed his enemies — as they were seemingly expected to. Reporters at Military.com, a military news service, uncovered internal communications from 82nd Airborne leadership suggesting that the crowd was screened for their political opinions.“If soldiers have political views that are in opposition to the current administration and they don’t want to be in the audience then they need to speak with their leadership and get swapped out,” one note read.To call this unusual is an understatement. I spoke with four different experts on civil-military relations, two of whom teach at the Naval War College, about the speech and its implications. To a person, they said it was a step towards politicizing the military with no real precedent in modern American history.“That is, I think, a really big red flag because it means the military’s professional ethic is breaking down internally,” says Risa Brooks, a professor at Marquette University. “Its capacity to maintain that firewall against civilian politicization may be faltering.”This may sound alarmist — like an overreading of a one-off incident — but it’s part of a bigger pattern. The totality of Trump administration policies, ranging from the parade in Washington to the LA troop deployment to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s firing of high-ranking women and officers of color, suggests a concerted effort to erode the military’s professional ethos and turn it into an institution subservient to the Trump administration’s whims. This is a signal policy aim of would-be dictators, who wish to head off the risk of a coup and ensure the armed forces’ political reliability if they are needed to repress dissent in a crisis.Steve Saideman, a professor at Carleton University, put together a list of eight different signs that a military is being politicized in this fashion. The Trump administration has exhibited six out of the eight.“The biggest theme is that we are seeing a number of checks on the executive fail at the same time — and that’s what’s making individual events seem more alarming than they might otherwise,” says Jessica Blankshain, a professor at the Naval War College (speaking not for the military but in a personal capacity).That Trump is trying to politicize the military does not mean he has succeeded. There are several signs, including Trump’s handpicked chair of the Joint Chiefs repudiating the president’s claims of a migrant invasion during congressional testimony, that the US military is resisting Trump’s politicization.But the events in Fort Bragg and Washington suggest that we are in the midst of a quiet crisis in civil-military relations in the United States — one whose implications for American democracy’s future could well be profound.The Trump crisis in civil-military relations, explainedA military is, by sheer fact of its existence, a threat to any civilian government. If you have an institution that controls the overwhelming bulk of weaponry in a society, it always has the physical capacity to seize control of the government at gunpoint. A key question for any government is how to convince the armed forces that they cannot or should not take power for themselves.Democracies typically do this through a process called “professionalization.” Soldiers are rigorously taught to think of themselves as a class of public servants, people trained to perform a specific job within defined parameters. Their ultimate loyalty is not to their generals or even individual presidents, but rather to the people and the constitutional order.Samuel Huntington, the late Harvard political scientist, is the canonical theorist of a professional military. In his book The Soldier and the State, he described optimal professionalization as a system of “objective control”: one in which the military retains autonomy in how they fight and plan for wars while deferring to politicians on whether and why to fight in the first place. In effect, they stay out of the politicians’ affairs while the politicians stay out of theirs.The idea of such a system is to emphasize to the military that they are professionals: Their responsibility isn’t deciding when to use force, but only to conduct operations as effectively as possible once ordered to engage in them. There is thus a strict firewall between military affairs, on the one hand, and policy-political affairs on the other.Typically, the chief worry is that the military breaches this bargain: that, for example, a general starts speaking out against elected officials’ policies in ways that undermine civilian control. This is not a hypothetical fear in the United States, with the most famous such example being Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s insubordination during the Korean War. Thankfully, not even MacArthur attempted the worst-case version of military overstep — a coup.But in backsliding democracies like the modern United States, where the chief executive is attempting an anti-democratic power grab, the military poses a very different kind of threat to democracy — in fact, something akin to the exact opposite of the typical scenario.In such cases, the issue isn’t the military inserting itself into politics but rather the civilians dragging them into it in ways that upset the democratic political order. The worst-case scenario is that the military acts on presidential directives to use force against domestic dissenters, destroying democracy not by ignoring civilian orders, but by following them.There are two ways to arrive at such a worst-case scenario, both of which are in evidence in the early days of Trump 2.0.First is politicization: an intentional attack on the constraints against partisan activity inside the professional ranks.Many of Pete Hegseth’s major moves as secretary of defense fit this bill, including his decisions to fire nonwhite and female generals seen as politically unreliable and his effort to undermine the independence of the military’s lawyers. The breaches in protocol at Fort Bragg are both consequences and causes of politicization: They could only happen in an environment of loosened constraint, and they might encourage more overt political action if gone unpunished.The second pathway to breakdown is the weaponization of professionalism against itself. Here, Trump exploits the military’s deference to politicians by ordering it to engage in undemocratic (and even questionably legal) activities. In practice, this looks a lot like the LA deployments, and, more specifically, the lack of any visible military pushback. While the military readily agreeing to deployments is normally a good sign — that civilian control is holding — these aren’t normal times. And this isn’t a normal deployment, but rather one that comes uncomfortably close to the military being ordered to assist in repressing overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations against executive abuses of power.“It’s really been pretty uncommon to use the military for law enforcement,” says David Burbach, another Naval War College professor (also speaking personally). “This is really bringing the military into frontline law enforcement when. … these are really not huge disturbances.”This, then, is the crisis: an incremental and slow-rolling effort by the Trump administration to erode the norms and procedures designed to prevent the military from being used as a tool of domestic repression. Is it time to panic?Among the experts I spoke with, there was consensus that the military’s professional and nonpartisan ethos was weakening. This isn’t just because of Trump, but his terms — the first to a degree, and now the second acutely — are major stressors.Yet there was no consensus on just how much military nonpartisanship has eroded — that is, how close we are to a moment when the US military might be willing to follow obviously authoritarian orders.For all its faults, the US military’s professional ethos is a really important part of its identity and self-conception. While few soldiers may actually read Sam Huntington or similar scholars, the general idea that they serve the people and the republic is a bedrock principle among the ranks. There is a reason why the United States has never, in over 250 years of governance, experienced a military coup — or even come particularly close to one.In theory, this ethos should also galvanize resistance to Trump’s efforts at politicization. Soldiers are not unthinking automatons: While they are trained to follow commands, they are explicitly obligated to refuse illegal orders, even coming from the president. The more aggressive Trump’s efforts to use the military as a tool of repression gets, the more likely there is to be resistance.Or, at least theoretically.The truth is that we don’t really know how the US military will respond to a situation like this. Like so many of Trump’s second-term policies, their efforts to bend the military to their will are unprecedented — actions with no real parallel in the modern history of the American military. Experts can only make informed guesses, based on their sense of US military culture as well as comparisons to historical and foreign cases.For this reason, there are probably only two things we can say with confidence.First, what we’ve seen so far is not yet sufficient evidence to declare that the military is in Trump’s thrall. The signs of decay are too limited to ground any conclusions that the longstanding professional norm is entirely gone.“We have seen a few things that are potentially alarming about erosion of the military’s non-partisan norm. But not in a way that’s definitive at this point,” Blankshain says.Second, the stressors on this tradition are going to keep piling on. Trump’s record makes it exceptionally clear that he wants the military to serve him personally — and that he, and Hegseth, will keep working to make it so. This means we really are in the midst of a quiet crisis, and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future.“The fact that he’s getting the troops to cheer for booing Democratic leaders at a time when there’s actually [a deployment to] a blue city and a blue state…he is ordering the troops to take a side,” Saideman says. “There may not be a coherent plan behind this. But there are a lot of things going on that are all in the same direction.”See More: Politics

By TREVOR HOGG Images courtesy of Pixar. The character design of Glordon is based on a tardigrade, which is a microscopic water bear. Rather than look at the unknown as something to be feared, Pixar has decided to do some wish fulfillment with Elio, where a lonely adolescent astrophile gets abducted by aliens and is mistaken as the leader of Earth. Originally conceived and directed by Adrian Molina, the coming-of-age science fiction adventure was shepherded by Domee Shi and Madeline Sharafian, who had previously worked together on Turning Red. “Space is often seen as dark, mysterious and scary, but there is also so much hope, wonder and curiosity,” notes Shi, director of Elio. “It’s like anything is ‘out there.’ Elio captures how a lot of us feel at different points of our lives, when we were kids like him, or even now wanting to be off of this current planet because it’s just too much. For Elio, it’s a rescue. I feel that there’s something so universal about that feeling of wanting to be taken away and taken care of. To know that you’re not alone and somebody chose you and picked you up.” The character design of Glordon is based on a tardigrade, which is a microscopic water bear. There is a stark contrast between how Earth and the alien world, known as the Communiverse, are portrayed. “The more we worked with the animators on Glordon and Helix, they began to realize that Domee and I respond positively when those [alien] characters are exaggerated, made cute, round and chubby,” states Sharafian, director of Elio. “That automatically started to differentiate the way the Earth and space feel.” A certain question had to be answered when designing the United Nations-inspired Communiverse. “It was coming from a place of this lonely kid who feels like no one wants him on Earth,” Shi explains. “What would be heaven and paradise for him? The Communiverse was built around that idea.” A sense of belonging is an important theme. “It’s also inspired by Adrian Molina’s backstory, and our backstories too, of going to animation college,” Sharafian remarks. “For the first time, we said, ‘This is where everybody like me is!’” Green is the thematic color for Elio. Visual effects are an important storytelling tool. “Especially, for our movie, which is about this boy going to this crazy incredible world of the Communiverse,” Shi observes. “It has to be dazzling and look spectacular on the big screen and feel like paradise. Elio is such a visual feast, and you do feel like, ‘I want to stay here no matter what. I can’t believe that this place even exists.’ Visual effects are a powerful tool to help you feel what the characters are feeling.” A wishlist became a reality for the directors. “Claudia Chung Sanii [Visual Effects Supervisor] gave Domee and me carte blanche for wish fulfillment for ourselves,” Sharafian remarks. “What do you want Elio’s outfit in space to look like? It was a difficult costume, but now when we watch the movie, we’re all so proud of it. Elio looks fabulous, and he’s so happy to be wearing that outfit. Who would want to take that off?” The Communiverse was meant to feel like a place that a child would love to visit and explore. Methodology rather than technology went through the biggest change for the production. “The Communiverse is super complex and has lots of moving pieces. But there’s not much CG can’t do anymore,” notes Claudia Chung Sanii. “Elemental did effects characters. We did long curly hair, dresses, capes, water and fire. What we hadn’t done before was be a part of that design process. How do we get lighting into layout? How do we see the shaders in animation in layout? The tools department was working on a software called Luna which does that. I went to the tools department and asked, ‘Can I play around with it?’ They were like, ‘Okay. But it’s not ready yet.’ Tools will basically be bringing RenderMan and an interactive lighting workflow to the pipeline across all of these DCCs. Because we light in Katana, you can’t get back upstream. The conceit that we were dipping our toe in on Elio was, ‘Whatever you do in lighting, anyone on the pipeline can see it.’” The influence of microscopic forms and macro photography grounded the Communiverse in natural phenomena. The variety in the Communiverse is a contrast to the regimented world on the military base. There were no departmental borders, in particular with cinematography. “We had our layout and lighting DPs start on the same day. Derek Williams wouldn’t shoot anything without Jordan Rempel, our lighting DP, seeing it,” Sanii states. “Jordan would drop in lighting and start doing key lighting as Derek’s team was laying out. It wasn’t like you had to hit the render button, wait for the render to come up and go, ‘Oh, my god, it’s dark! I didn’t know that it was nighttime.’” A new term was adopted. “Meredith Hom [Production Manager] and I pulled the entire crew and leadership into this mental concept that we called the ‘college project.’ For some of us, college was a time when we didn’t have titles and crafts. You begged, borrowed and stole to hit that deadline. So much of our world has become linear in our process that I wanted to break that down to, ‘No. We’re all working together. The scope of this film is too large for us to wait for each other to finish our piece. If this person is slammed, fine. Figure out a different idea to do it with what tools you have.’” Directors Domee Shi and Madeline Sharafian are drawn to chubby, exaggerated and cute characters. Forgoing the word ‘no’ led to the technology breaking down. “I remember times when crowds [department] is dressing all of the aliens and because of forgetting to constrain it to the Communiverse, they all show up at the origin, and you’re going, ‘Why is there a whole party going on over there?’” Sanii laughs. “On Elio, it was always forward. There were no rules about locking things down or not installing over the weekend. It was always like, ‘Put it all in, and we’ll deal with it on Monday.’ There would be some funny stuff. We never QC’d something before walking it into the room. Everyone saw how the sausage was made. It was fun and not fun for Harley Jessup [Production Designer] because sometimes there would be a big thing in the middle screen, and he would say, ‘Is that finished?’ There was no way we could get through this film if we kept trying to fix the thing that broke.” An aerial image of Elio as he attempts to get abducted by aliens. Part of the design of the Coummuniverse was inspired by Chinese puzzle balls. A former visual effects art director at ILM, Harley Jessup found his previous experiences on projects like Innerspace to be helpful on Elio. “I liked that the directors wanted to build on the effects films from the 1980s and early 1990s,” reflects Jessup. “I was there and part of that. It was fun to look back. At the time, the techniques were all practical, matte paintings and miniatures, which are fun to work with, but without the safety net of CG. One thing Dennis Muren [VES] was keen on, was how people see things like the natural phenomenon you might see in a microscopic or macro photography form. We were using that. I was looking at the mothership of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which Dennis shot when he was a young artist. It was nice to be able to bring all of that history to this film.” Earth was impacted by a comment made by Pete Docter (CCO, Pixar). “He said, ‘The military base should feel like a parking lot,” Jessup reveals. “You should know why Elio wants to be anywhere else. And the Communiverse needs to be inviting. We built a lot of contrast into those two worlds. The brutalist architecture on the military base, with its hard edges and heavy horizontal forms close to the earth, needed to be harsh but beautiful in its own way, so we tried for that. The Communiverse would be in contrast and be all curves, translucent surfaces and stained-glass backlit effects. Things were wide open about what it could be because each of the aliens are from a different climate and gravity. There are some buildings that are actually upside down on it, and the whole thing is rotating inside like clockwork. It is hopefully an appealing, fun world. It’s not a dystopian outer space.” Exploring various facial expressions for Elio. A tough character to get right was Aunt Olga, who struggles to be the guardian of her nephew. Character designs of Elio and Glordon. which shows them interacting with each other. Architecture was devised to reflect the desired tone for scenes. “In the Grand Assembly Hall where each alien has a desk and booth, the booth is shaped like an eyelid that can close or open,” Jessup explains. “It increases the feeling that they’re evaluating and observing Elio and each of the candidates that have come to join the Communiverse.” A couple of iconic cinematic franchises were avoided for aesthetic reasons. “As much as I love Star Wars and Star Trek, we wanted to be different from those kinds of aliens that are often more humanoid.” Ooooo was the first alien to be designed. “We did Ooooo in collaboration with the effects team, which was small at that time. She was described as a liquid supercomputer. We actually used the wireframe that was turning up and asked, what if it ended up being this network of little lights that are moving around and can express how much she was thinking? Ooooo is Elio’s guide to the Communiverse; her body would deform, so she could become a big screen or reach out and pluck things. Ooooo has an ability like an amoeba to stretch.” Flexibility is important when figuring out shot design. “On Elio, we provided the layout department with a rudimentary version of our environments,” states David Luoh, Sets Supervisor. “It might be simple geometry. We’re not worried necessarily about shading, color and material yet. Things are roughly in place but also built in a way that is flexible. As they’re sorting out the camera and testing out staging, they can move elements of the set around. Maybe this architectural piece needs to be shifted or larger or smaller. There was a variation on what was typically expected of set deliveries of environments to our layout department. That bar was lowered to give the layout department something to work with sooner and also with more flexibility. From their work we get context as to how we partner with our art and design department to build and finalize those environments.” Regional biomes known as disks are part of the Communiverse. “There are aquatic, lush forest, snow and ice, and hot lava disks,” Luoh remarks. “The hot disk is grounded in the desert, volcanic rock and lava, while for the lush disk we looked at interesting plant life found in the world around us.” The Communiverse is a complex geometric form. “We wanted these natural arrangements of alien districts, and that was all happening on this twisting and curving terrain in a way that made traditional dressing approaches clunky. Oftentimes, you’re putting something on the ground or mounted, and the ground is always facing upward. But if you have to dress the wall or ceiling, it becomes a lot more difficult to manipulate and place on something with that dynamic and shape. You have stuff that casts light, is see-through and shifting over time. Ooooo is a living character that looks like electronic circuitry that is constantly moving, and we also have that element in the walls, floors and bubble transport that carry the characters around.” Sets were adjusted throughout the production. “We try to anticipate situations that might come up,” Luoh states. “What if we have a series of shots where you’re getting closer and closer to the Communiverse and you have to bridge the distance between your hero and set extension background? There is a partnership with story, but certainly with our layout camera staging department. As we see shots come out of their work, we know where we need to spend the time to figure out, are we going to see the distant hills in this way? We’re not going to build it until we know because it can be labor-intensive. There is a responsiveness to what we are starting to see as shots get made.” Combining the familiar into something unfamiliar was a process. “There was this curation of being inspired by existing alien sci-fi depictions, but also reaching back into biological phenomena or interesting material because we wanted to ground a lot of those visual elements and ideas in something that people could intuitively grasp on to, even if they were combined or arranged in a way that is surprising, strange and delightful.”

NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter captured the first horizon view of Arsia Mons, an enormous volcano on the Red Planet. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / ASU NASA’s longest-running Mars mission has sent back an unprecedented side view of a massive volcano rising above the Red Planet, just before dawn.On May 2, as sunlight crept over the Martian horizon, the Odyssey spacecraft captured Arsia Mons, a towering, long-extinct volcano, puncturing a glowing band of greenish haze in the planet’s upper atmosphere. The 12-mile-high volcano — nearly twice the height of Mauna Loa in Hawaii — punctures a veil of fog, emerging like a monument to the planet's ancient past. The space snapshot is both visually arresting and scientifically enlightening."We picked Arsia Mons hoping we would see the summit poke above the early morning clouds," said Jonathon Hill, who leads Odyssey's camera operations at Arizona State University, in a statement, "and it didn't disappoint."   Arsia Mons sits at the southern end of a towering trio of volcanoes called the Tharsis Montes. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech To get this view, Odyssey had to do something it wasn’t originally built for. The orbiter, which has been flying around Mars since 2001, usually points its camera straight down to map the planet’s surface. But over the past two years, scientists have begun rotating the spacecraft 90 degrees to look toward the horizon. That adjustment allows NASA to study how dust and ice clouds change over the seasons. Mashable Light Speed Want more out-of-this world tech, space and science stories? Sign up for Mashable's weekly Light Speed newsletter. By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Thanks for signing up! Though the image is still an aerial view, the vantage point is of the horizon, similar to how astronauts can see Earth's horizon 250 miles above the planet on the International Space Station. From that altitude, Earth doesn’t fill their entire view — there’s enough distance and perspective for them to see the planet's curved edge meeting the blackness of space. Odyssey flies above Mars at about the same altitude. Arsia Mons sits at the southern end of a towering trio of volcanoes called the Tharsis Montes. The Tharsis region is home to the largest volcanoes in the solar system. The lack of plate tectonics on the Red Planet allowed them to grow many times larger than those anywhere on Earth.Together, they dominate the Martian landscape and are sometimes covered in clouds, especially in the early hours. But not just any clouds — these are made of water ice, a different breed than the planet’s more common carbon dioxide clouds. Arsia Mons is the cloudiest of the three.  Scientists have recently studied a particular, localized cloud formation that occurs over the mountain, dubbed the Arsia Mons Elongated Cloud. The transient feature, streaking 1,100 miles over southern Mars, lasts only about three hours in the morning during spring before vanishing in the warm sunlight. It's formed by strong winds being forced up the mountainside.   Related Stories The cloudy canopy on display in Odyssey's new image, according to NASA, is called the aphelion cloud belt. This widespread seasonal system drapes across the planet's equator when Mars is farthest from the sun. This is Odyssey's fourth side image since 2023, and it is the first to show a volcano breaking through the clouds."We're seeing some really significant seasonal differences in these horizon images," said Michael D. Smith, a NASA planetary scientist, in a statement. "It’s giving us new clues to how Mars' atmosphere evolves over time." Topics NASA Elisha Sauers Elisha Sauers writes about space for Mashable, taking deep dives into NASA's moon and Mars missions, chatting up astronauts and history-making discoverers, and jetting above the clouds. Through 17 years of reporting, she's covered a variety of topics, including health, business, and government, with a penchant for public records requests. She previously worked for The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Virginia, and The Capital in Annapolis, Maryland. Her work has earned numerous state awards, including the Virginia Press Association's top honor, Best in Show, and national recognition for narrative storytelling. For each year she has covered space, Sauers has won National Headliner Awards, including first place for her Sex in Space series. Send space tips and story ideas to [email protected] or text 443-684-2489. Follow her on X at @elishasauers.

ILM teams with Ben Stiller and Apple TV+ to bring thousands of seamless visual effects shots to the hit drama’s second season. By Clayton Sandell There are mysterious and important secrets to be uncovered in the second season of the wildly popular Apple TV+ series Severance (2022-present). About 3,500 of them are hiding in plain sight. That’s roughly the number of visual effects shots helping tell the Severance story over 10 gripping episodes in the latest season, a collaborative effort led by Industrial Light & Magic. ILM’s Eric Leven served as the Severance season two production visual effects supervisor. We asked him to help pull back the curtain on some of the show’s impressive digital artistry that most viewers will probably never notice. “This is the first show I’ve ever done where it’s nothing but invisible effects,” Leven tells ILM.com. “It’s a really different calculus because nobody talks about them. And if you’ve done them well, they are invisible to the naked eye.” With so many season two shots to choose from, Leven helped us narrow down a list of his favorite visual effects sequences to five. (As a bonus, we’ll also dive into an iconic season finale shot featuring the Mr. Milchick-led marching band.) Before we dig in, a word of caution. This article contains plot spoilers for Severance. (And in case you’re already wondering: No, the goats are not computer-graphics.) Severance tells the story of Mark Scout (Adam Scott), department chief of the secretive Severed Floor located in the basement level of Lumon Industries, a multinational biotech corporation. Mark S., as he’s known to his co-workers, heads up Macrodata Refinement (MDR), a department where employees help categorize numbers without knowing the true purpose of their work.  Mark and his team – Helly R. (Britt Lower), Dylan G. (Zach Cherry), and Irving B. (John Turturro), have all undergone a surgical procedure to “sever” their personal lives from their work lives. The chip embedded in their brains effectively creates two personalities that are sometimes at odds: an “Innie” during Lumon office hours and an “Outie” at home. “This is the first show I’ve ever done where it’s nothing but invisible effects. It’s a really different calculus because nobody talks about them. And if you’ve done them well, they are invisible to the naked eye.”Eric Leven 1. The Running Man (Episode 201: “Hello, Ms. Cobel”) The season one finale ends on a major cliffhanger. Mark S. learns that his Outie’s wife, Gemma – believed killed in a car crash years ago – is actually alive somewhere inside the Lumon complex. Season two opens with Mark S. arriving at the Severed Floor in a desperate search for Gemma, who he only knows as her Innie persona, Ms. Casey. The fast-paced sequence is designed to look like a single, two-minute shot. It begins with the camera making a series of rapid and elaborate moves around a frantic Mark S. as he steps out of the elevator, into the Severed Floor lobby, and begins running through the hallways. “The nice thing about that sequence was that everyone knew it was going to be difficult and challenging,” Leven says, adding that executive producer and Episode 201 director, Ben Stiller, began by mapping out the hallway run with his team. Leven recommended that a previsualization sequence – provided by The Third Floor – would help the filmmakers refine their plan before cameras rolled. “While prevising it, we didn’t worry about how we would actually photograph anything. It was just, ‘These are the visuals we want to capture,’” Leven says. “‘What does it look like for this guy to run down this hallway for two minutes? We’ll figure out how to shoot it later.’” The previs process helped determine how best to shoot the sequence, and also informed which parts of the soundstage set would have to be digitally replaced. The first shot was captured by a camera mounted on a Bolt X Cinebot motion-control arm provided by The Garage production company. The size of the motion-control setup, however, meant it could not fit in the confined space of an elevator or the existing hallways. “We couldn’t actually shoot in the elevator,” Leven says. “The whole elevator section of the set was removed and was replaced with computer graphics [CG].” In addition to the elevator, ILM artists replaced portions of the floor, furniture, and an entire lobby wall, even adding a reflection of Adam Scott into the elevator doors. As Scott begins running, he’s picked up by a second camera mounted on a more compact, stabilized gimbal that allows the operator to quickly run behind and sometimes in front of the actor as he darts down different hallways. ILM seamlessly combined the first two Mark S. plates in a 2D composite. “Part of that is the magic of the artists at ILM who are doing that blend. But I have to give credit to Adam Scott because he ran the same way in both cameras without really being instructed,” says Leven. “Lucky for us, he led with the same foot. He used the same arm. I remember seeing it on the set, and I did a quick-and-dirty blend right there and thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this is going to work.’ So it was really nice.” The action continues at a frenetic pace, ultimately combining ten different shots to complete the sequence. “We didn’t want the very standard sleight of hand that you’ve seen a lot where you do a wipe across the white hallway,” Leven explains. “We tried to vary that as much as possible because we didn’t want to give away the gag. So, there are times when the camera will wipe across a hallway, and it’s not a computer graphics wipe. We’d hide the wipe somewhere else.” A slightly more complicated illusion comes as the camera sweeps around Mark S. from back to front as he barrels down another long hallway. “There was no way to get the camera to spin around Mark while he is running because there’s physically not enough room for the camera there,” says Leven. To capture the shot, Adam Scott ran on a treadmill placed on a green screen stage as the camera maneuvered around him. At that point, the entire hallway environment is made with computer graphics. Artists even added a few extra frames of the actor to help connect one shot to the next, selling the illusion of a single continuous take. “We painted in a bit of Adam Scott running around the corner. So if you freeze and look through it, you’ll see a bit of his heel. He never completely clears the frame,” Leven points out. Leven says ILM also provided Ben Stiller with options when it came to digitally changing up the look of Lumon’s sterile hallways: sometimes adding extra doors, vents, or even switching door handles. “I think Ben was very excited about having this opportunity,” says Leven. “He had never had a complete, fully computer graphics version of these hallways before. And now he was able to do things that he was never able to do in season one.” (Credit: Apple TV+). 2. Let it Snow (Episode 204: “Woe’s Hollow”) The MDR team – Mark, Helly, Dylan, and Irving – unexpectedly find themselves in the snowy wilderness as part of a two-day Lumon Outdoor Retreat and Team-Building Occurrence, or ORTBO.  Exterior scenes were shot on location at Minnewaska State Park Preserve in New York. Throughout the ORTBO sequence, ILM performed substantial environment enhancements, making trees and landscapes appear far snowier than they were during the shoot. “It’s really nice to get the actors out there in the cold and see their breath,” Leven says. “It just wasn’t snowy during the shoot. Nearly every exterior shot was either replaced or enhanced with snow.” For a shot of Irving standing on a vast frozen lake, for example, virtually every element in the location plate – including an unfrozen lake, mountains, and trees behind actor John Turturro – was swapped out for a CG environment. Wide shots of a steep, rocky wall Irving must scale to reach his co-workers were also completely digital. Eventually, the MDR team discovers a waterfall that marks their arrival at a place called Woe’s Hollow. The location – the state park’s real-life Awosting Falls – also got extensive winter upgrades from ILM, including much more snow covering the ground and trees, an ice-covered pond, and hundreds of icicles clinging to the rocky walls. “To make it fit in the world of Severance, there’s a ton of work that has to happen,” Leven tells ILM.com. (Credit: Apple TV+). 3. Welcome to Lumon (Episode 202: “Goodbye, Mrs. Selvig” & Episode 203: “Who is Alive?”) The historic Bell Labs office complex, now known as Bell Works in Holmdel Township, New Jersey, stands in as the fictional Lumon Industries headquarters building. Exterior shots often underwent a significant digital metamorphosis, with artists transforming areas of green grass into snow-covered terrain, inserting a CG water tower, and rendering hundreds of 1980s-era cars to fill the parking lot. “We’re always adding cars, we’re always adding snow. We’re changing, subtly, the shape and the layout of the design,” says Leven. “We’re seeing new angles that we’ve never seen before. On the roof of Lumon, for example, the air conditioning units are specifically designed and created with computer graphics.” In real life, the complex is surrounded by dozens of houses, requiring the digital erasure of entire neighborhoods. “All of that is taken out,” Leven explains. “CG trees are put in, and new mountains are put in the background.” Episodes 202 and 203 feature several night scenes shot from outside the building looking in. In one sequence, a camera drone flying outside captured a long tracking shot of Helena Eagan (Helly R.’s Outie) making her way down a glass-enclosed walkway. The building’s atrium can be seen behind her, complete with a massive wall sculpture depicting company founder Kier Eagan. “We had to put the Kier sculpture in with the special lighting,” Leven reveals. “The entire atrium was computer graphics.” Artists completed the shot by adding CG reflections of the snowy parking lot to the side of the highly reflective building. “We have to replace what’s in the reflections because the real reflection is a parking lot with no snow or a parking lot with no cars,” explains Leven. “We’re often replacing all kinds of stuff that you wouldn’t think would need to be replaced.” Another nighttime scene shot from outside the building features Helena in a conference room overlooking the Lumon parking lot, which sits empty except for Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman) riding in on his motorcycle. “The top story, where she is standing, was practical,” says Leven, noting the shot was also captured using a drone hovering outside the window. “The second story below her was all computer graphics. Everything other than the building is computer graphics. They did shoot a motorcycle on location, getting as much practical reference as possible, but then it had to be digitally replaced after the fact to make it work with the rest of the shot.” (Credit: Apple TV+). 4. Time in Motion (Episode 207: “Chikhai Bardo”) Episode seven reveals that MDR’s progress is being monitored by four dopplegang-ish observers in a control room one floor below, revealed via a complex move that has the camera traveling downward through a mass of data cables. “They built an oversize cable run, and they shot with small probe lenses. Visual effects helped by blending several plates together,” explains Leven. “It was a collaboration between many different departments, which was really nice. Visual effects helped with stuff that just couldn’t be shot for real. For example, when the camera exits the thin holes of the metal grate at the bottom of the floor, that grate is computer graphics.” The sequence continues with a sweeping motion-control time-lapse shot that travels around the control-room observers in a spiral pattern, a feat pulled off with an ingenious mix of technical innovation and old-school sleight of hand. A previs sequence from The Third Floor laid out the camera move, but because the Bolt arm motion-control rig could only travel on a straight track and cover roughly one-quarter of the required distance, The Garage came up with a way to break the shot into multiple passes. The passes would later be stitched together into one seemingly uninterrupted movement. The symmetrical set design – including the four identical workstations – helped complete the illusion, along with a clever solution that kept the four actors in the correct position relative to the camera. “The camera would basically get to the end of the track,” Leven explains. “Then everybody would switch positions 90 degrees. Everyone would get out of their chairs and move. The camera would go back to one, and it would look like one continuous move around in a circle because the room is perfectly symmetrical, and everything in it is perfectly symmetrical. We were able to move the actors, and it looks like the camera was going all the way around the room.” The final motion-control move switches from time-lapse back to real time as the camera passes by a workstation and reveals Mr. Drummond (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) and Dr. Mauer (Robby Benson) standing behind it. Leven notes that each pass was completed with just one take. 5. Mark vs. Mark (Episode 210: “Cold Harbor”) The Severance season two finale begins with an increasingly tense conversation between Innie Mark and Outie Mark, as the two personas use a handheld video camera to send recorded messages back and forth. Their encounter takes place at night in a Lumon birthing cabin equipped with a severance threshold that allows Mark S. to become Mark Scout each time he steps outside and onto the balcony. The cabin set was built on a soundstage at York Studios in the Bronx, New York. The balcony section consisted of the snowy floor, two chairs, and a railing, all surrounded by a blue screen background. Everything else was up to ILM to create. “It was nice to have Ben’s trust that we could just do it,” Leven remembers. “He said, ‘Hey, you’re just going to make this look great, right?’ We said, ‘Yeah, no problem.’” Artists filled in the scene with CG water, mountains, and moonlight to match the on-set lighting and of course, more snow. As Mark Scout steps onto the balcony, the camera pulls back to a wide shot, revealing the cabin’s full exterior. “They built a part of the exterior of the set. But everything other than the windows, even the railing, was digitally replaced,” Leven says. “It was nice to have Ben [Stiller’s] trust that we could just do it. He said, ‘Hey, you’re just going to make this look great, right?’ We said, ‘Yeah, no problem.’”Eric Leven Bonus: Marching Band Magic (Episode 210: “Cold Harbor”) Finally, our bonus visual effects shot appears roughly halfway through the season finale. To celebrate Mark S. completing the Cold Harbor file, Mr. Milchick orders up a marching band from Lumon’s Choreography and Merriment department. Band members pour into MDR, but Leven says roughly 15 to 20 shots required adding a few more digital duplicates. “They wanted it to look like MDR was filled with band members. And for several of the shots there were holes in there. It just didn’t feel full enough,” he says. In a shot featuring a God’s-eye view of MDR, band members hold dozens of white cards above their heads, forming a giant illustration of a smiling Mark S. with text that reads “100%.” “For the top shot, we had to find a different stage because the MDR ceiling is only about eight feet tall,” recalls Leven. “And Ben really pushed to have it done practically, which I think was the right call because you’ve already got the band members, you’ve made the costumes, you’ve got the instruments. Let’s find a place to shoot it.” To get the high shot, the production team set up on an empty soundstage, placing signature MDR-green carpet on the floor. A simple foam core mock-up of the team’s desks occupied the center of the frame, with the finished CG versions added later. Even without the restraints of the practical MDR walls and ceiling, the camera could only get enough height to capture about 30 band members in the shot. So the scene was digitally expanded, with artists adding more green carpet, CG walls, and about 50 more band members. “We painted in new band members, extracting what we could from the practical plate,” Leven says. “We moved them around; we added more, just to make it look as full as Ben wanted.” Every single white card in the shot, Leven points out, is completely digital. (Credit: Apple TV+). A Mysterious and Important Collaboration With fans now fiercely debating the many twists and turns of Severance season two, Leven is quick to credit ILM’s two main visual effects collaborators: east side effects and Mango FX INC, as well as ILM studios and artists around the globe, including San Francisco, Vancouver, Singapore, Sydney, and Mumbai. Leven also believes Severance ultimately benefited from a successful creative partnership between ILM and Ben Stiller. “This one clicked so well, and it really made a difference on the show,” Leven says. “I think we both had the same sort of visual shorthand in terms of what we wanted things to look like. One of the things I love about working with Ben is that he’s obviously grounded in reality. He wants to shoot as much stuff real as possible, but then sometimes there’s a shot that will either come to him late or he just knows is impractical to shoot. And he knows that ILM can deliver it.” — Clayton Sandell is a Star Wars author and enthusiast, TV storyteller, and a longtime fan of the creative people who keep Industrial Light & Magic and Skywalker Sound on the leading edge of visual effects and sound design. Follow him on Instagram (@claytonsandell) Bluesky (@claytonsandell.com) or X (@Clayton_Sandell).