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Thanks dehhn. From the LRO picture in the article, you can see that they're actually taking high-precision elevation maps of both the Moon and Earth into consideration, which sounds like something rather computationally intensive. I might be wrong, but I don't think they used Blender to handle that.

I would be curious to hear what tool they actually use, their pipeline, etc.

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To the best of my knowledge, it was animated in Maya and rendered with Pixar's Renderman. When I was in that group, we used IDL to do any elaborate calculations needed, and then imported the data into Maya/Renderman. This is exactly what Hollywood does when they have to render a scene that requires a lot of simulation. I can ask Ernie if he used anything special for this production.

That's amazing, thanks so much. Ernie, if you're reading this, great job :)

Depends how high precision those maps are, but I can't imagine it being a very big deal with the right data pruning(you only need to consider elevations near wear earth intersecting sun rays are close to tangential to the moons surface)

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