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Animation

An annotated render no one asked for or needs to see if we’re being honest here

As always, click to embiggen. If you’re thinking, “That looks familiar,” that’s because like the last rendered image I posted, this one is taken from “I See The Earth!” This one’s embellished little more than the last one, in that I added a road and a couple vehicles. Taking each element in turn:

  • The ground is taken from NASA’s CGI moon kit, so is in theory accurate, but the scale I’m sure is all wrong. It acts weird when the camera pans, which I assume has something to do with the displacement.
  • I was too lazy to properly texture the road, but decided this was retro-futuristic so could get away with it just being made of Space Metal™. Never mind the lack of off-ramps.
  • The stars aren’t right, but unless your name is Neil I doubt you care.
  • Roads need cars, so I created the green one. I didn’t like how it came out, so I went looking for other inspiration and found an old Tonka Toys Mini Futuristic Turbo Rocket Space Car. It’s being driven by a Red Sox fan at much higher than the speed limit.
  • I got frustrated with texturing the front-most structure, so decided to try an experiment, printing out the UV map and using a lightbox to do hand coloring on a separate sheet of paper, which I then scanned back in. That’s what the more organic texture is made from. The boxes are vector, because fountain pen lines weren’t cutting it.
  • There’s an animated version of this I’m not posting. The still below is from a frame or two after the image above, except closer and with the camera following the red car. The lunar landscape looks much better all blurred out.

So that’s how I spent a good number of my January off hours.