Eon has a giant plan: rebuild the whole solar system in 3D — the Moon, Earth, Mars, Jupiter. He tried it a couple of years ago, built "a really rough black hole and a lot of spheres," and then lost the file. (The black hole was still cool — "it's like Interstellar," they joke.) This time they want to do it for real, with way more detail. And the secret to that detail isn't imagination. It's NASA.

Step one: borrow NASA's real Moon photos

Instead of guessing what the Moon looks like, Eon pulls up NASA's website, where the space agency has posted incredibly detailed pictures of the Moon. He zooms in — fumbling a little with the controls at first ("two fingers, you zoom") — until he can see the surface up close.

"I can see a lot of craters on the Moon," he says. "All the craters and mountains and all that." That's the whole point of a reference: a real photo shows you details you'd never invent on your own.

NASA even has several versions. Eon scrolls past a 2019 color map and a newer 2025 color map, comparing how much crater detail each one shows. Picking the right reference image is part of the job.

Step two: wrap the flat picture around a sphere

Here's the clever idea Eon and his dad work through. A photo is flat, but the Moon is a ball. So how do you put one on the other?

They use a comparison kids already know: a world map. A globe is round, but to print Earth on a flat page, you "expand it" and lay it out flat. Eon's dad describes it perfectly — you take the sphere and "make it really flat... it's like a pancake."

A planet texture is just a pancake-flat photo that gets bent back around a sphere.

So modeling the Moon works in reverse: start with NASA's flat pancake-photo, then wrap it around the 3D ball so every crater lands in the right spot. It's the same thing Google Earth does — Eon even calls that out — taking flat satellite images and stretching them over a globe.

Step three: add height so craters really pop

A wrapped photo still has one problem: it's smooth. The craters are only painted on — they look flat. NASA solves this too, and Eon spots it in their tutorial: you can "add this height information."

This is called a displacement map (or height map). It's a second image where brightness means altitude — light spots are high, dark spots are low. The computer reads it and actually pushes the surface in and out, so mountains rise up and crater bottoms sink down. Now the Moon isn't a "toy moon" with a picture stuck on it — it's bumpy and real.

"That information is brilliant," Eon's dad says. NASA already did the hard part by measuring the whole Moon; Eon just gets to build from their data. His goal for the next video says it all: "a realistic Moon, not just some toy moon."

Try it

Find a small ball — an orange works — and a flat sticker or piece of paper. Try to make the flat paper cover the whole ball smoothly. You can't! It wrinkles at the top and bottom. That wrinkle is exactly the puzzle mapmakers and 3D artists solve when they turn a flat photo into a round planet. Then press your thumb into the orange peel to make a "crater" — that dent is what a height map does for a 3D Moon: it adds the bumps a flat picture can't.