In September we saw Nvidia 'debunk' claims that the lunar landing was a hoax. Many of the hoax claims refer to how the lighting of Neil Armstrong’s shot of Buzz Aldrin climbing down the lunar module's ladder is not realistic, considering the light source(s). This leads conspiracy theorists to conclude the shots were taken in a studio or some such artificially lit environment. Nvidia's game demo design team used its newest Maxell GPUs and Unreal Engine 4 to recreate an accurately lit moon environment to see if its rendered 3D shots would be significantly different to the lunar photos, they weren't.
At the time Nvidia wrote how the combination of its Maxwell GPU and Unreal Engine 4 environment design "simulated how the sun’s rays, coming from behind the lander, bounced off the moon’s surface, and Armstrong’s suit, to cast light on Aldrin as he stepped off the lander". The Nvidia team created the scene using a new Maxwell technology called Voxel-Based Global Illumination (VXGI) which breaks a scene into thousands of boxes to work out how light bounces around a scene in real-time. It's particularly computing intensive but supported in hardware by Maxwell architecture GPUs.
Now Nvidia has released the software it used in its debunking to the general public. The firm says that you need to have purchased a Maxwell-based GeForce GTX 980 or GeForce GTX 970 GPU to use the 'Maxwell Apollo 11 Demo', which weighs in at 470MB. You will also need Windows 7 or newer.
The demo software allows you to view the moon landing scene with various lighting and camera angles, shift the position of the sun and alter the exposure. We are told that altering the exposure also 'debunks' the lack of stars questions regarding some moon lander shots. If you are interested in the moon landing and have the required hardware then why not give this software a go?
