NASA Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV) ā Blender Model & Lunar Scene .Blend File.
This is a high-fidelity 3D model of the NASA Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV), commonly known as the lunar rover. The LRV was an electric, battery-powered rover used during the final three Apollo program missions (Apollo 15, 16, and 17) between 1971 and 1972.
The model is intended for use in Blender and is suitable for educational, artistic, or visualization projects. All included textures are 4K and suitable for close-ups as can be seen in the renders below. The model as a whole is suitable for renders up to 10K, making it suitable for medium sized prints.
Please see included PDF document for details on the CC0 1.0 Universal (Creative Commons Zero) license.
You can get this scenes .blend file for Blender 4.5+ here:
Download
(Google Drive)
Some textures courtesy: AmbientCG
Moon Rocks courtesy: PolyHaven
The following are all 4K Evee renders from the above linked scene file:
You can see the final finished Evee render + AO Pass of the scene here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atYHZGi9DQE
Tested and working on 1060 GPU 12GB RAM 6Core CPU, though higher specs are recommended for optimal Evee viewport performance.
This model was originaly made by me in 3DSMax and released for that community in 2014, and after first starting to learn blender last year i am proud to be able to finally share this model with the Blender community.
I made the original model using references from NASA archive footage of the Rover both from assembly and from the Moons surface, as well as taking clues from the Lunar Rover Operations Handbook. Though i tried to stay as close to the look of the original LRV as possible, a lack of good/consistant reference images at the time means this is at best only a good likeness of the original, and not truly accurate in a scientific sense.
Making it was one of the most fun and rewarding projects i have ever worked on over the years and I hope you all like it, happy rendering! 