Making a Photo-realistic Mercury in Cinema 4D

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Achieving a Rocky & Colorful surface

We've been working hard on realising our vision for our short sci-fi film Syntactic Labyrinths.
This space film requires us to make many different planets and by approaching each one of them in a physically accurate way, you'll get solid results.

In this tutorial we will be going over how to use Colorama in After Effects to manipulate your texture map into the colors you're after. Mercury is a complicated planet to render as there is no "true" photographic reference available. We use the Narrowband filtered images as a color reference and find a middle-ground between the classic monochrome Mercury look and the vibrant color maps. After setting up the scene in Cinema 4D we will cover camera-settings, lighting and rendering. In After Effects we will cover some simple compositing techniques using Luma Masks.

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