Landing

As I was watching the live launch of the Crew Dragon Demo-2, a friend was surprised that the signal cut-off for a few seconds as the 1st stage booster landed. I jokingly remarked that it will have landed when I’m done rendering it.

This joke gave me the idea for this little pic. Since I wanted to keep the scope small and didn’t want to go into painting textures for the reentry marks on the fuselage, I mostly did it with procedural textures. As fiddling with procedural stuff can be a time sink, I tried to reproduce the esthetics of the crappy transmission and had some fun with realistic image distortions in the compositor. I think most time was spent hunting down reference images and technical documentation of the ship and tweaking the landing pad material… I should really take up texture panting :stuck_out_tongue:

Falcon9 model by https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2914233 (Creative Commons - Attribution) and the landing ship model by https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3429121 (Creative Commons - Attribution - Share Alike)