For All Mankind: Lunar Environments

A few of the many shots I worked on For All Mankind season 1 and 2. As one of the lead environment artists, I evolved the lookdev and surfacing setup that I originally designed for 'Ad Astra', creating a procedural material/shading network/setup that provided all of the displaced surface detail and texture for the environments across every shot in all seasons. In total, this procedural shading setup was used to render over 30+ minutes of rendered environment frames in season one alone, over 40,000 4K frames.

I made liberal use of substance designer to create various displacement textures such as craters, different types of boot prints, feature breakups, blended with other displacement maps of sand, gravel, etc. and all of this was layered together in katana & renderman with careful masking to avoid repetition even across tens of kilometers of of ground. The result was a material setup that could be applied to any low resolution geometry and give an instant moon look that could be tuned as needed.

We used this to create vast environments with enough control and flexibility to be art directed and work from super close to super wide, with enough crispy details to hold up at the show's 4K render resolution. The setup was artist friendly enough for other members of the environment team to pick up, allowing us to divide and conquer the huge amount of lunar shots on the show.

The workflow was for artists to layout rough, low resolution geometry based on camera coverage and for model detail, texturing and shading to come through this procedural shading setup in katana with renderman. This was balanced and supplemented with custom sculpting, texture masks, rock scatter, and dmp patches to help blend with the on set footage.

As always, these builds are highly collaborative in nature and our kick ass team did an amazing job pumping out cool shots. We had a crack team of environment artists each taking a piece - some blocking out models, others doing layout, hero sculpting, mask texturing, and houdini scattering, and of course katana lookdev where everything was brought together and homogenized with the shading setup.

For All Mankind turned out to a pretty decent show, its worth checking out on Apple TV+, and season 2 which we also worked on is out now. Check it out!