WIP Terraformed Moon

Started by sweetcement, September 15, 2012, 04:41:55 PM

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sweetcement

My first attempt at Earth's moon with earthlike atmosphere.  Created color map for surface based on altitude (tans and greens and whites) and latitude in Photoshop.  Used a little bit of artistic license on the "gibbous" picture by making the blue earthshine much brighter than it really is, to put a little illumination on the nightside.

Note the fuzzy blue line of air around the edge -- much wider than you see on pix of Earth, for 2 reasons -- 1/6 gravity makes the air six times higher (thins out slower, and you need more air to get earthlike pressure on surface) -- and also, the moon is four times smaller than Earth, so the line of air looks bigger in comparison.  Think you can see this effect in Cassini photos of Titan's atmosphere.

DIdn't add any stars to the background, since you probably would not see them too well by contrast to the sunlit moon.

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Mahnmut

Great start!
I also planned to try it with the moon, but got distracted by my alltime favorite Mars again. But these high resolution moon data are tempting...
Good shading. As you say WIP , but for final renders I´d recommend to increase the atmosphere quality (and maybe lower the haze density) if it is adapted to distance it gets quite low with planetary views. It would be a shame to hide a 256pix/° terrain under lowres atmo.
Courious to see where this is going!
Best Regards,
J

bigben

If  you're using my terrain file and you want to use the "assigned" sea level, it's at an altitude of 9100m.  I offset the data so that there weren't any negative altitudes which greatly simplifies using the exported TIFF image...  The far side of the moon could make for some interesting cratered coastlines as well.