Digital Production Arts
DPA 8070 3D Modeling and Animation with Jim Sidletsky
By: Benjamin B. Warner
Exercise 2: Solar System Animation
Date: September 2nd, 2020
Objective:
Construct a solar system out of basic shapes and animate orbits with moons.
Solution:
Arranging the spheres and assigning colors was simple enough, but the real challenge came in creating believable orbits and recording the resulting animation.
Obviously, realistic orbits were unreasonable to implement (Earth would complete about 165 rotations before Neptune could do 1), so the next best thing is to rank the orbits very linearly. This menas that Mercury completes 9 rotations when Venus completes 8 and so on until… Neptune completes 2. As if there was a 9th planet at some point. Strange.
Moons were determined to orbit each planet in a very similar way, carefully avoiding placing any in the same exact orbit. This was done by placing them in up to 4 distinct orbital layers and up to 5 distinct angular offets to allow for up to 20 moons on any planet with distinct orbits.
Finally, the orbits are all set in a way to create a perfectly looping gif. This results in a periodic “alignment of the spheres”, which is associated with some sort of supernatural phenomena. Maybe it’s Cthulhu?
Hypergraph Hierarchy:
Sun and Inner Planet details:
Outer Planets details:
