Measured shapes.
Authored composition.
The useful unit is a landform: a crater, caldera wall, lava tongue, fault scarp or glacier face. Heightmaps and scans become parts of a terrain kit.
1. Research with pictures
Claude sessions researched candidate datasets, then generated HTML review pages with hillshades, colour relief, oblique renders and downloadable heightmaps. Looking at the source relief made it possible to choose recognisable geology rather than a plausible name.
Volcano research cards · Moon and Mars research cards
2. Register and blend elevation
Reproject raster data into a local frame in metres, reconcile vertical offsets, handle no-data holes and identify stereo noise. Preserve the useful broad relief; add high-frequency detail from better sources where necessary.
Donor features are cut, detrended, rotated and blended into the composition. A real crater can be transplanted to an invented location. A measured heightfield can be resampled to a finer work grid without creating new measurement detail. Every such change belongs in the credits.
The Shackleton and Marius Hills studies also show a simpler measured-base route: LOLA supplies broad relief, authored geometry supplies local landforms and game access, and photographic regolith/rock material detail completes the surface. Their source review separates the bare elevation from the textured game captures.
3. Give cliffs their own geometry
A heightfield stores one height per horizontal location. It cannot represent a pit overhang or an undercut cliff. Scanned cliff modules supply steep faces; an authored mesh supplies the Tranquillitatis shaft and overhang.
The wall pipeline cuts usable faces from terrestrial lidar, photogrammetry or laser scans, meshes and decimates them, then fits the pieces along steep edges. Modules need their tops tucked below the lip and their feet buried into talus. Gaps, repeated silhouettes and mismatched textures are common review findings.
4. Dress it for the destination
Io uses Kīlauea, Tarawera and Krafla as terrestrial analogues. Its sulfur pattern comes from an offline ballistic plume and deposition model, plus frost and fumarole masks. Lava activity, material colours, emission, rocks, particles and lighting complete the look.
Europa’s Conamara scene starts from Galileo stereo topography; Earth cliff scans provide additional wall detail. The other Europa study uses scanned glacier walls in an authored chasma layout. Earth analogues provide form, not evidence that these are exact surveyed alien landscapes.
5. Bake, review and iterate
Bake heightfields, normals, material masks, scan meshes and scatter transforms. The browser renders the result in Three.js, using terrain and rock LODs where appropriate. Inspect close, gameplay and overview cameras; name the largest visible defect and make a bounded revision.
The recovered prompts show this division of labour: the owner selects references and critiques the pictures; Claude researches data, writes processing and rendering code, builds comparisons and implements revisions. The map is the product of that loop, not a single prompt.
6. Port the accepted result
The game port preserves the height field, material layers, wall placement and scatter. Fixed-camera comparisons check the native renderer against the prototype; collision, reachable building sites and resources need separate gameplay validation. This compact repository carries browser demos and review evidence rather than the full Godot game.