Lighting on the Moon

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Scroll to the end to learn how to build this terrain ↓

In space, there's no air.

So light is never scattered or distorted. It blasts straight out of the sun and whams right into the subject.

What does this mean for 3D art?

It means that it's insanely easy to set up. All it takes is a single light source, hitting all objects from the same direction:

• Press Shift + A.

• Choose Light > Sun.

Done! Realistic moon lighting.

But now that you have the light set up, there are some tips I can give you for making it look really nice in your scene.

First, here's how a Sun light works (hint: like the Sun.)

• Illuminates everything in your scene from the same direction, at the same time.

• The location of the Sun light in the scene doesn't matter. Its rotation does.

• The Power setting controls the brightness.

• The Angle setting controls the softness of the shadows.

The first tip for nice lunar lighting is to angle your light. Rotate it so that it's making shadows perpendicular to the camera (just like in the above render.)

More tilt = longer shadows.

In the above render, I also rotated the light toward the camera a bit. This brings out a lot of contrast in the scene by moving the shadows toward the camera side of the rocks.

I set the Angle to 0.5 for very sharp shadows that are just slightly softened around the edges. I left the light's Color at pure white for a plain sunlight color.

I turned the Strength of the light up to 30. This might be too strong for your scene, so tweak it to taste. I was trying to emulate the high-exposure look you see in lots of Moon pictures.

The terrain in the image is generated with Geometry Nodes. It only uses 4 different noise textures. I did a quick tutorial on how to build it, if you're interested:

Now you know how easy it is to set up a Sun light for a lunar scene. This technique also works for a lot of other scenes. Planet scenes, asteroids, spacecraft—anything space-related where you want a harsh, realistic look. (You could soften the look with a gentle fill light as needed.)

Hope this was helpful, or at least mildly interesting!

— Samuel

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