Procedural Moonrise
Manuel N. Gamito and Steve C. Maddock (2006)
Department of Computer Science, The University of Sheffield
This image shows the surface of a planet and of a moon generated with procedural fractal models. Although the planetary landscape appears to be mapped over a horizontal plane it is really part of a spherical surface just like the moon. Had the camera been positioned higher, the curvature of the horizon would have become visible. The image was rendered with ray tracing. A simple probabilistic approximation is used to compute the indirect diffuse illumination on the surface of the planet. Computing the indirect diffuse illumination component with Monte Carlo ray tracing would have been too expensive, even with the help of a radiance cache, due to the large range of scales that is visible in the image. The reflectance model for the moon uses the Blinn dusty shader that accounts for light reflection over surfaces covered with a thick layer of dust. The atmosphere is rendered using the Nishita & Nakamae single-scattering Rayleigh model.