This is a looping animation of a lunar cycle that I made in Blender to test lighting (and, inevitably, do some materials practice). Mostly, I created this just to see how easy it would be to view the different phases of the lunar cycle on a sphere with a directional light, and got carried away making it look pretty.
The scene setup is very simple: the moon rotates around a focal point (where the earth/viewing planet would be), the camera is locked to view it from that angle, and a directional light acts as the sun, with just a touch of ambient light from the world/scene.
The moon’s surface and the stars are procedural materials, and the moon uses bump + displacement to give the craters some depth. The stars are an inverted sphere that has location constrained to the camera’s location, and rotation locked - sort of like how a skybox would work in a video game.
