When attempting to create a realistic moon like terrain we had a very difficult time hand creating a terrain that looked natural and could pass for the moon. During a bit of downtime and after some significant frustration we started looking for alternatives. The thought was that there was a lot of satellite data for the Earth, Moon, and Mars. What if there was accurate heightfield data that had already been transformed into gray scale maps.
It felt like a long shot but we decided to give it a try. After a lot of searching we came upon the Mars MOLA Digital Terrain Model Map by the USGS at map-a-planet.org. This turned out to be just what we were looking for. The map allows you to pan and drill down in the map.
We tried a lot of different terrains but drilling down too much made the maps too pixilated and terrain that was too uneven was hard to navigate. In the end we settled on the map to the right. The moonbase dome is in the black crater at the center.
This terrain had an excellent mix of just what we needed. It had nice craters of a good size and the terrain wasn't too uneven. The crater was also very circular which was important to us as we wanted a circular dome over the crater.
We eventually did find Earth and Moon heightfield maps but obviously the Earth models were not going to give us what we wanted. The Moon maps had promise but the tended to be much more densely packed with craters which made navigating the terrain difficult and finding they type of crater we were looking for very difficult but we may revisit these maps for future areas of Moonbase.
In the map the dark areas are low and the light areas are elevated.
Anyone that wants to look at the Mars map and has a terrain they would like us to try either take a screen shot or just tell us the coordinates and why you think that terrain is worth exploring. As Moonbase evolves you will be exploring actual terrain from Mars and the Moon which we think is very interesting. We just hope you will all be patient with us as we get there.
Below are some test images and test maps we looked at although there were many others.
Moonbase.lu
http://www.moonbase.lu/article.php?story=20101112193348835