Highly Realistic Moon

Last crawled date: 7 years, 1 month ago

High resolution textured and bump-mapped Moon created for the "Lunatics!" animated science-fiction series.The albedo and color maps are based on data from the US's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and the bump map data is from the radar altimeter on the Japanese Kaguya spacecraft. These were processed and published as image maps by NASA (and are therefore "copyright free" public domain works). These images contained some artifacts, so I have used image-healing and cloning techniques to fill in the gaps. This high-resolution image data is the main reason for the size of this package.We plan to use this model for shots including the whole Moon, although it is workable at closer distances. However, at distances appropriate for low orbit, the mesh is a bit loose and we will probably need a finer topology model for final renders. There may also be some distortion of features near the poles, as is common with image-mapped UV spheres.I created this model after following Andrew Price's "realistic Earth" tutorial, and found that useful, although being an airless body, the Moon is much simpler to model.Latest Change on 2013/09/17, 19:30:07Updated blend file