Making the Moon

Having already worked out the process of building a planet in C4D after creating the Earth, we endeavoured to create our moon using a very similar process. Considering the level of detail we managed to achieve was fairly reasonable, the effort that went into building the moon was mostly minimal. Beginning with a simple sphere object, we used the colour material editor to apply an image wrap around the shape. The key here was finding an image that was of a high enough resolution to ensure that the moon did not pixelate around the large moon shape, and that the level of detail remained strong even as the moon is navigated around and moved closer to. We found a 8K image wrap from NASA's official catalogue, which provided us with the level of sharpness and detail that we were looking for. I then edited this image using Adobe Photoshop to bring out the contrast and sharpness further in order to create the best result possible. After this, the we subdivided the sphere shape in order to remove any faces that the sphere had, making it as smooth and round as possible.

Although creating this moon was a fairly simple task, the difficulty in making it look realistic came when lighting it. The images below show the various test renders we carried out using various lighting set ups.

Here, we can see how the moon visuals progressed through different lighting experiments. As can be seen, the level of atmosphere and ambience changes dramatically with the different lighting set ups. A simple three point lighting set up was our final choice, experimenting a great deal with intensity levels until we found a set up where each light complimented one another, not only a detailed image but a dramatic tone.