Moon Surface

[Falcon]

Out of an inspiration, I decided to do a moon-looking-at-earth shot.

The earth is an image map shader, moon surface is entirely procedural. I've tried to approximate what I've seen in some photos from the moon landings. It's not (yet) perfect, but getting there.

[EoinArmstrong]

Interesting start   Let's see some more!

[Oshyan]

Very nice moon surface I'd say. Is your moon sphere accurate size? I think if you just had a higher resolution Earth texture, this would look pretty excellent. Ideally it would be a spherically mapped texture so you could apply it to a planet surface and have a realistic atmosphere on top. That would add a lot to the realism.

- Oshyan

[Henry Blewer]

I have used this surface map of the Earth before. It's a good one. I have found that if it is mapped using a tube map, the latitude of the landmasses at the poles map more accurately.
There is also specular and bump maps of the earth which match this image.

[Falcon]

No, my moon is not acurately sized at this time.

I am, however, using a spherically mapped surface map. I've disabled atmosphere for this shot because it causes too much grain and I was too tired to fix that.

I know there are normal, specular, etc. maps to go along, but I have absolutely no idea how to apply them. Any hints and I'll be happy to do it.

[Falcon]

Some changes and improvements. What you don't see is that in this shot both earth and moon are accurately sized. I did, however, reduce the distance betwen the two, otherwise earth would be a lot smaller.

Still not 100% happy, but I think this one is better. 100% TG2, except for HDRI conversion done in Photoshop.

[Tangled-Universe]

hmmm...I liked the earth-surface-map better from the first version. The scales seem to be better. Since you're using real-world scales you might consider using real-world distance from earth to the moon as well, if it fits with your artistic idea with this image of course. I like the moon surface, nice work on that.
Honestly I really don't like the nebula-like thing around earth. If you have troubles with setting up a good quality atmo (renderwise) for earth then you should only worry about the atmosphere samples. Increase it with increments of ~16 until you get the desired quality. Logically, use crop renders to determine this.

Martin

[Henry Blewer]

At SourceForge.net there is a program called Stellarium. It's freeware. It draws wonderful sky's.  I have grabbed screens from it and incorporated them as background images. Using it, you could have am accurate star pattern for this shot.
There is so much light pollution here in Binghamton, that you can't see the stars anymore. I use Stellarium for my night sky fix.

[Seth]

wow ! France is very up north on this one, i am going to buy a new fur coat ^^

[Henry Blewer]

Gerry Anderson would love it for the breakaway of the moon. I still say this is coming along nicely.

[Falcon]

wow ! France is very up north on this one, i am going to buy a new fur coat ^^

Yes, I can't for the life of me figure out how to rotate the spherical projection on the planet object. Anyone got an idea?

[Henry Blewer]

Rotate the planet. It looks like it's around 30 degrees tilt.

[Falcon]

Rotate the planet. It looks like it's around 30 degrees tilt.

I'd love to, but I can't find an option to rotate the planet. Am I missing something obvious?

[Tangled-Universe]

Rotate the planet. It looks like it's around 30 degrees tilt.

I'd love to, but I can't find an option to rotate the planet. Am I missing something obvious?

No you're not, as far as I know you can't rotate planets.

[Henry Blewer]

In the object settings, under the transform tab. There is translate (coordinates), rotate, and scale. Each has three inputs, one for each axis' Cartesian coordinate.