Moon Landing - Procedurally Generated Lunar Surface

Best watched in HD. Rendered with Blender Cycles. No textures are used in this video, it's all geometry and procedural displacement. Drivers are used to control the subdivision level of individual tiles based on camera distance, there's no Python programming involved.

This is the second test of this approach. Memory usage has increased, so I had to switch from GPU to CPU this time, which needed around 15-30 minutes per frame depending on distance to the surface.

If you rather want to use the first method then just leave out the Decimate (Un-Subdivide) modifier. This might make geometry switching more visible but also should work faster.

Tags:
nasa, moon, lunar, Blender (software), cycles, space, Animation, level of detail, LOD, visual effects, vfx, Apollo Program (Space Program), Adaptive Surface Detail, moon landing

[KaiKostack]

I used a few procedural textures to form the surface via displacement modifiers. A Clouds texture produced the basic irregular structure, additionally two Musgrave textures (type: Multifractal, basis: Voronoi F1) formed the craters in different sizes. You can use a heavily subdivided plane as starting point and play with the settings until it looks nice. The LOD Driver part is a bit more complex, but you can see the settings I used for this in the video. Good luck for your project.

[BlindIllusionist]

This is soo awesome! You clearly deserve more attention!

[mrquint]

Really beautiful work.  I have it pretty close to working, but how did you get your array elements to accept subdivision/decimate variables individually?  On my end the whole array reacts as a whole

[prodeous]

Are you planning to release the file for reverse engineering? Or some form of tutorial?

Never played with drivers, so any input would be greatly appreciated