Fully Mooned by MichaelEaton
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Description
In my continuing quest to get Terragen to do things that it wasn't meant to do, I now submit this creation. No, it is not a photo, although it is derived from a photo. It occurred to me that the Moon is unusual in that elevations are roughly equivalent to brightness. The low lava plains are dark, and the rough highlands are bright. There are exceptions to the rule, like impact rays. So, first, I took a grayscale photo of the Moon and converted it to BMP. Then I imported it into Terragen as an elevation map. I then carefully created a surface map that would closely -- I hoped -- approximate the original albedo. So, here it is: a fake Moon picture taken from a real Moon picture.
Comments (15)
Lindo_wvw
wow, you're right, I never thought of that. Good experiment.
Dotthy
This is excellent!
prutzworks
excellent work
Xlars
Thank you for the very interesting description on how you did this picture. Very original idea, and wonderful result.
petite-soeur
Excellent work! Klasse gemacht...
Neo1
Great Idea and excellent done :)
Golog
impressive!
Pastoret
Good idea Michael!! You can have a look to a similar idea on the Moon: http://www.astrosurf.com/rondi/lune3d.htm (in french, sorry... use an online translator :-)
SoundChaser
That's a heightfield? Nice experiment, excellently done!
MichaelEaton
It is ironic that we have far better elevation data for Mars & Venus than we do for the Moon. Hopefully one day that can be changed, so we can create truly realistic views of the Moon.
Orca
Cool idea... are you moonstruck? ;o)
Mister-seven
Great Idea
stevage
Nice idea, but I'm skeptical :) You can make terragen render whatever you like by using textures or your technique. Sort of like taking a hi-res photo of a person, sticking it in a scene, then positioning the camera close-up, directly in front of their face...true, it's rendered, but it's also a photo.
MichaelEaton
Essentially what I am doing is taking a grayscale photo and reprocessing it by a very non-standard method. However, the only reason the particular technique I used works is that the Moon is the only natural object -- that I know of -- where brightness is mostly a function of elevation. That quality does not apply to a photo of someone's face or any other subject I can think of. Terragen surface maps are limited to either elevation or slope for texture differences. Therefore, I can assign bright textures to the heights, and dark colors to the low, and I will wind up with a simulation of a real lunar photo. In order to do something similar with another subject, you'd have to split the color photo into RGB, map them in Terragen, and then recombine the results. Even then, I don't know how well it would work. Might make an interesting experiment, tho'.
kestrello
Excellent work... Great realism!