POV-Ray Program by Jay Tanner - 2025
LUNEX For POV-Ray - A Virtual Lunar Telescope and Explorer
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LUNEX was designed to render custom photo-realistic images of the moon from virtually any user-defined perspective and phase illumination. To render the lunar images, the program script requires POV-Ray v3.7, the free, open-source 3D ray-tracing package, to be installed and working.
For more information on POV-Ray, and to obtain the free POV-Ray 3D ray-tracing software to run LUNEX, visit the official site at: https://www.povray.org
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CAVEAT
3D ray-tracing is very, very resource intensive and can also become very time-consuming, depending on your computer system architecture and the program script settings and image resolution selected. For optimal results, a fast, multi-core CPU and as much RAM as possible is recommended. In this kind of work, patience is needed . You can never have too much speed, RAM or patience.
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Inspiration
Originally, I started rendering small segments of the lunar surface using simple bump maps but wanted to extend the rendering to the entire lunar surface, if possible.
Mare Orientale was one of the primary targets I was using for testing and comparison as I was developing LUNEX and comparing the rendered images to actual NASA photos.
However, bump map rendering proved to be less than ideal, especially when rendering the lunar terminator (shadow line). The shadows were cut off with razor-sharpness at the terminator and the shading of the phases looked unnaturally sharp. This led to designing a spherical height field to replace the bump map and LUNEX was born upon the first successful natural-looking terminator render and then built up from there.
The original bump map code was retained in the final LUNEX to so it could be used for faster scene previews without having to use the full height field render mode 2 while experimenting.
This is the raw NASA image that served as the initial inspiration behind LUNEX.
This is a LUNEX v2 rendering of the Mare Orientale region.
