Lunar Surface

Started by Ingsoc75, February 23, 2012, 03:10:00 PM

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Ingsoc75

I'm doing an animation of a rover on the moon. I've seen some nice renders of closeup Earth surfaces. Anybody have a tutorial or insight on how to achieve the same level of detail on the moon?

bobbystahr

something borrowed,
something Blue.
Ring out the Old.
Bring in the New
Bobby Stahr, Paracosmologist

Oshyan



bobbystahr

#4
Quote from: Ingsoc75 on February 24, 2012, 10:04:57 AM
I'm looking to do a high detail kinda like this:

http://planetaryexplorer.blogetery.com/files/2011/02/moonmts.jpg

and REALLY like this:

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=13866.0
the one you REALLY want to emulate looks to be pure TG2...no DEMs or anything, just FakeStones and Terragen technique and shot in 'space light'. basically Black & White with no atmosphere to supply colour...least that's what it seems like to me
something borrowed,
something Blue.
Ring out the Old.
Bring in the New
Bobby Stahr, Paracosmologist

billhd

I didn't make the REALLY cut!  The blogetery file is mine.  I'll update that site one day, I have more to show.

The real trick is no trick, it's an understanding of TG2 from experience and the forum/docs and an exact idea of what you want to depict.  Depends on the requirement. Does the customer (this sounds like you're doing a job for someone) care that your moon looks just like one of the landing sites photographed up close?  Will you look up to any hills, or just one angle toward the ground? Getting close to photo-reality, call it 90%, is straightforward (and time-consuming).  To achieve an exact match is quite difficult I find.   What we find from the hi-res orbital imagery of the LRO satellite is that many areas of the moon don't look like the Apollo or Surveyor or Luna/Lunokhod sites, that the morphology of the moon's surface is rich and variegated and has specific weirdnesses.  Making a generic lunar surface with little reference to reality is not too difficult.

The REALLY file is maybe at the 80% level, I can easily look at it and tell it's CG and TG, but still better than NASA's Frassanito surfaces (which excel more in the depiction of craft/astronauts).  The stones are not textured enough, there are what I like to call "octave marks", i.e. ridges that result in low octave Perlin noise (ok for Martian dunes), no craters, but overall it's ok, and reasonably convincing esp. the roughness of parts of the scene.   I hope this is not too harsh for the artist.  The blogetery file, which also falls short, is an attempt to recreate some of the features seen at the Apollo 17 landing site, including the mountain texturing (it's too pronounced with other inaccuracies).  It is a current subject of attempts at improvement on my part. 

Suggest you avoid using DEM files if you don't have to match an exact set of large features.  The grayscale heightmaps  need to be worked, they do not yield good up-close views in my experience, maybe somebody else has had better success with those.

Hope this helps a bit,

Bill

Ingsoc75

#6
Actually, I got the image links reversed.

http://planetaryexplorer.blogetery.com/files/2011/02/moonmts.jpg is the REALLY image. :)

You've been able to capture that "powdery feel" to the surface. Reminds me of some scenes from the movie Moon. Your name watermark also looks like the font they used in that movie.

I've been trying to do it in Max but no so much luck so a co-worker suggested Terragen. I used the classic version about 10 years ago for some projects but Terragen 2 looks very promising.

billhd

Thanks!  TG2 represents a form of multiscale simulation.  Dovetail or overlap the scales that represent the features.  The TG2 units may be taken as being in meters.  Fake stones of a very small size can be used for gritty or powdery surfacing; in fact I believe that to truly capture the appearance of the lunar surface you need to include glass spherules that can be very small in reality, from millimeters down to microns,  I think they are what give the surface powerful forward and backward light-scattering properties that yield high surface brightness looking toward or away from the sun especially when it is at low angles - another factor in getting to 100% convincing. (All the Apollo landings took place during the local lunar morning to give the astros high shadow relief for picking out landing sites free of dangerous rocks and craters.) (In the image I did not use very small fake stones, just power fractals at very small scales.)  This may be redundant to older posts - the complete, or nearly so, collection of Hasselblad color and b&w still photography, a definitive visual reference, is archived in hi-res at:

http://www.apolloarchive.com/apollo_gallery.html

If you have the luxury of working in color...the moon has subtle color variations.  What a cool place. 

Bill