This isn't a photo from Artemis II – it's an Unreal Engine 5 scene made with real NASA data

NASA's Artemis II mission has the world obsessed with the moon again this week. People have been wowed by the iPhone moon photos taken by astronauts, while others think they've spotted Super Mario twerking on the moon in a bizarre optical illusion.

But photography isn't the only way that people are capturing the beauty of our nearest celestial neighbour. A 3D visualisation expert at Epic Games has used real NASA data to recreate the lunar surface in a stunning piece of digital art made in the real-time 3D creation platform Unreal Engine 5.

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Simon Blakeney is a Technical Account Manager at Epic Games. He recreated the surface of the moon with incredible detail in Unreal Engine's illumination and reflections system Lumen.

Writing on LinkedIn, Simon says he used data from Cesium Moon, a 3D dataset that compiles data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) as 3D Tiles, the Open Geospatial Consortium Community Standard. The 3D Tiles of the lunar surface enable 3D visualisations, simulations and analytics for advanced digital twin creation.

With its highly detailed landscape, the scene uses Deferred Rendering with a Maximum Screen Space Error of 0.1 and a Culled Screen Space Error of 0.1, combined with increased Maximum Simultaneous Tile Loads, increased Maximum Cached Bytes, and an increased Loading Descendant Limit.

Simon's posted his Unreal Engine renders on ArtStation