Ad Astra: Surfacing the moon with Substance Designer

Whilst working on Ad Astra last year I was given the challenge to texture/surface/lookdev several moon environments.

I used substance designer to model several craters and breakup displacement maps which I scattered and layered over and over again in renderman/katana to create a procedural shader setup that could be applied to any low resolution base mesh to output a detailed displaced moon environment.

As we rolled this out onto closer and closer shots I added more breakup plus several tileable rock, dirt and pebble textures from another lookdev artist Sergey, to have enough detail from from any distance.

Diffuse colour came from mesh calculated data from the displaced surface mixed with breakup, height and tileable maps to mimic reference and achieve the creative direction from our awesome supes.

The sequence we worked on is available online:
youtube.com/watch?v=stOVFXuyyWQ

Images copyright fox and artofvfx
artofvfx.com/ad-astra-jedediah-smith-vfx-supervisor-met