How I made the Moon scene in 'Destruction is Beautiful'

This is a still taken from my animation 'Destruction is Beautiful'. I thought I'd just give a run down of how the moon was made and some post processing techniques I used for this particular shot. So firstly the moon. The moon was actually very easy to make, and was done in C4D. It is simply a sphere that has been made editable, and then displaced with a texture map of the actual surface of the moon (sourced from NASA photographs) and then layered with some additional bump maps for added realism. The earth I will make a separate post about as its a little more complex and deserves a separate post I think! The lighting for the scene was also relatively straight forward. I used an omni light placed to the right with a slight orange yellow tint to replicate the sun, and then added a number of spotlights to light the right side of the moon in this image to create some more drastic shadowing. The post effects were done for this particular image in Photoshop, however the scene in the animation was done in After Effects. After Effects was actually much easier to use for the colour grading and adding the flares with Video Co-Pilots great plugin 'Optical Flares' I made custom flares and placed them in relevant places as well as tracking some larger flares with an orange glow to the sun light object, just for some added atmosphere.

I have a tutorial on creating the moon which will be posted here once it's been uploaded, so stay tuned!

Thanks for reading! And you can download the image here!