A pale blue dot
I’ve not had a real go at creating a space scene before so I decided to see what I could create with the help of NASA’s library of satellite imagery and elevation data.
Modelling and Texturing
The geometry was a simple set of spheres but the real challenge was setting up the shaders effectively. I had to combine the images provided by NASA within a Redshift shader network in a way that would produce a realistic image. The main process was using the colour information as the diffuse information and the elevation map as a displacement. By dialing in the strength of the displacement you get the fine details such as the craters on the surface of the moon.
Rendering and Compositing
This project seemed turned into a study of “what does space actually look like”. The problem with creating a render in space is you have to decide if you want it to look realistic (as if shot by a real camera), or look like how most people imagine it would look. If you were to expose a camera for a planetary body like The Moon or Earth, you wouldn’t see stars. So to have a render without them is probably more accurate, but doesn’t look as, for want of a better word “spacey”. Also, there is usually so much light bouncing off something like The Moon, that any subtle colours are washed out.
To look a little closer into this I did three renders of both The Moon and Earth, using different parameters and backgrounds, as seen below.
The Moon
Earth
In the end I decided that I would go with the full star-scape in the background as it looked a lot more interesting. I will, however, be checking out what I can do with different levels of detail in the future! I really enjoy astrophotography so this is right up my street.
While we’re on the subject, here’s a picture I took of the Milky Way whilst I was in New Zealand!
As always, a tidy scene file, is a happy scene file!