Subject: Re: Moon Map
From: [email-masked] (James Hastings-Trew)
To: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 24 Jul 1995 08:33:51 -0700

>[email-masked] said:
>   I once did an awful lot of hunting around the internet and other
>places for a proper projection map of the moon similar to that famous
>"Earth From Space" poster, which is the perfect projection (the name
>of which escapes me at the moment) for mapping onto a sphere in LW.
>   AFAICT, nothing like that exists.

I too have looked in vain for something like this. I needed a moon that I
could freely move the camera around, and I did not much care if it was
accurate at all, so I created a spherical crater map in Forge using
multiple layers of a texture that allowed me to create the proper shading
of tones to produce a proper bump map (can't remember the name of the
particular texture off-hand, but it allowed me to make these circular spots
that shaded darker towards the center that produced a nice crater "bowl"
when bump-mapped) at various scales from tiny to huge to give the surface
the correct "look". In Lightwave, I gave the sphere a dull grey colour with
hint of blue, and used the fractal noise texture on the diffusion map to
give the surface that mottled look the moon has. While not by any stretch
of the imagination was my result THE moon, it was a pretty good ringer. If
there had been a way to put "rays" around some of the big craters, I would
have done so... it is the only thing really missing.

If the original poster needs astronomical accuracy, all I can suggest is to
contact either NASA, JPL, or the National Geographic Society to see if they
have such an image for sale. (National Geographic had a pretty nice
wall-map of the moon a while back, which included both the earthward and
spaceward sides.)

As well as looking around the internet for images, I also looked at the
local library for moon pictures, and there is remarkably little material
available along these lines.

If my fake moon is of any interest to the original poster, I'd be happy to
post to Tomahawk or wherever.

--
[email-masked] (James Hastings-Trew) sent this message.
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