Day 1 (part 2): Cinematic Earth and Moon intro

Spent today building the entire visual foundation of Artemis Navigator. pretty dope

What I built

The opening shot: has a cinematic view with Earth as a massive curved horizon on the left, with the moon in the distance.

Photoreal Earth: built from real NASA/Solar System Scope 8K textures. It includes a day map, cloud layer, specular ocean reflections, and normal-mapped terrain. Wrote a custom GLSL atmosphere shader with a Fresnel limb glow that fades into space as a real gradient instead of a hard ring. That part took the most iteration.

The Moon: tidally locked (it doesn’t rotate relative to Earth, just like irl), textured with the actual NASA LRO color map.

Lighting & post: ACES-style rendering, UnrealBloom postprocessing so the atmosphere and markers glow.

The hard part

The atmosphere. Getting it to look like a soft gradient instead of a sharp blue outline took a lot of sweat and tears. The fix was switching from a back-side shell to a front-side halo shader that concentrates the glow at the grazing limb and falls off both inward and outward.

Also the animation from the starting shot to the Moon’s south pole kept jumping at the start, and i had to do some serious debugging to figure out that my (in dev) orbit controls were jumping the Earth while the camera stayed still.

Next I have to actually do the real work, which is implementing the launch window calculator using JPL Horizons ephemeris data, and the Python FastAPI backend for the orbital mechanics. Hopefully I can but its late and I’m tired.