PROJECT 1: PLANETS
Due Thursday, January 31st, 2019
In this project, we first followed a tutorial in order to create a scene of planets around a sun, then modified 3 aspects of that original scene to make the final video. The tutorial produced a scene similar to the one below:
The first change that I made was to modify the texture for the sun, with a method that involved using a fractal pattern that was modified with the time parameter. This created a sun that looked and behaved incredibly realistically, with dark and light spots that evolved over the course of the animation:
The second change involved changing the orbits of the planets from something very uniform to something more interesting - each planet rotates around the sun with the same number of rotations as its place in the solar system, starting with Pluto. Thus, Pluto rotates once in one loop, whereas Mercury rotates nine full times around the sun in that time period. I also changed the tangents (which default to Spline), to Linear tangents, which meant that I didn't have a "start-up" and a "slow-down" time for the planets' movement at the beginning and end of the animation, respectively. This means that this animation can be played on loop without any visible interruptions:
This led me to my final change of changing the proportions of the planets to make them more uniform. I think that this change makes the orbital patterns created more visible and overall serves to bring more order to this system. Not to mention, Pluto gets to be the biggest planet in this solar system - yay Pluto!
All in all, I'm happy with how this turned out. The final video is below: