I have a need to create a series of pictures in which the moon phases differ. I've had many theories on how that could be done, but instead of starting to hit my head on several brick walls, I plead your help.

How would it be easiest to accomplish having the same moon in different phases?
Commercial solutions are welcome too, just hopefully nothing exorbiant. Not about to but the Moon and Earth, at least not from Vanishing Point...  ;)

Easiest solution that comes to mind for me...

1. Go out and take a picture of the full mon on a good clear night.

2. Scan/download this to your computer, to act as a background image for reference.

3. Set up a hi-res sphere in Poser, with the moon image in the background.

4. Adjust  the camera settings until the sphere covers the whole moon.

5. Use an infintie light to light up the sphere. Animate it to start at directly behind the sphere, then move diagonally to light the lower right section of it, across the front of the sphere, and then off away round the top left, until you return to your starting point again. Make your last frame number 29. I recommend setting keyframes at each of the four 'quarters' (new, waxing half moon, full, waning half, and new again)., but you might want to add in midpoints as well at the crescent and gibbous pahases, too.

Make sure you keyframe 28, and then delete fram 29. This ensures that you have a steady looping set of frames.

1. Render out the animations as a series of tif files.

2. IN Photoshop/Gimp/graphcis program of choice, open you mon image, and your chosen frame from the lit sphere animation. Paste the lit sphere image onto the moon image, and use the 'darken' blend mode ( I think - it might be lighten, though). This will black out the area of the moon that is in shadow on the moon, and keep the lit section visible.

Since you have 28 images, you could do one image for each day of the lunar cycle ( I know that the cycle isn't exactly 28 days, but it's close enough). And since the moon always shows the same face to the Earth (it's period of revolution is the same as it's orbit), then you dont' have to worry about needing to change the background moon image.

I'm sure someone else wil come up with another solution, but this was just one that came off the top of my heda.

JonTheCelt

Here-

http://planetpixelemporium.com/planets.html

Click on the 'Earth' scroll down you'll find a flat high detailed lunar map that you can slap on a sphere. Light as needed :)

geo

it's hard to imagine any major 3d rendering software that doesn't come with earth, moon, and planet maps. be fair, though - poser is for posing 3d surface representations of humans, not rendering planets.

i would used thornes(faeriewylde) free moon with a lunar map and trans maps for the phases.
netta

If you can do it in post, Flaming pear makes a plug called Lunar Cell for photoshop that works very well by my lights.  I have some examples of the full moon in my gallery.  It can also do phases.

Quote - Here-

http://planetpixelemporium.com/planets.html

Click on the 'Earth' scroll down you'll find a flat high detailed lunar map that you can slap on a sphere. Light as needed :)

geo

Those are pretty cool maps - thanks for the link!

On the subject of the original question, I did some playing around and devised way to animate a moon going through it's phases. In the next series of posts, I'll layout the process in case anyone may still find it useful.

To set the stage, I used a standard Poser hi res ball and applied the moon map from the link geoegress provided and made the background black. This process uses animated texturing in the transparency channel, so it is mainly done entirely in the Material Room..