"Red Star Fly-by" Slowdown

Well, after a productive week, I kind of let things slide. I did make some progress though.

Aiming the Camera

I worked on the aiming problem in the animation. I experimented with some of the Blender animation features to see if I could get Blender to handle the aiming issue. From what I can tell, it should be possible, but I wasn’t able to get it to work for me, so went back to the way I had done it so far.

Sometimes the problem was the interpolation Blender did, but a few times it turned out I had mistyped some information. I don't think I got everything, but I think it looks OK. I think I’m done with this step now.

A More Interesting Star

I tried to do something with the star to make it more interesting to look at. Right now, it is featureless and rather boring to look at. I had cut down the length of time the camera aims at it, but it still seems to go by very slowly. I tried to add texture to the star surface. I tried to add an atmosphere layer to give some distortion. Nothing I tried got me anything I thought looked better. In fact, I couldn’t see any difference at all.

Captions and Audio

My original plan was to add captions to the video to describe what is on the screen. Then would add some "spacy" sounds in the background. NASA has produced some audio files for various planets in the solar system based on the radio waves they produce. Some of the sounds are very eerie. I used some for my “旅行火星 (My Trip to Mars)” video.

I discussed my plans with someone at the script group I joined. He suggested that I have some voice overs. For example, a "mission control" voice, a news anchor and "color commentator". I have thought about the suggestion at length. I find the idea attractive, but it would also mean it will take me longer to finish the movie.

I would need to write dialogue for the character, find voice actors to play the parts, and then arrange for the sound recording. I’m not all that keen to take that route. On the other hand, I wanted to take a similar approach with the revised version of “The Barrier” I want to finish. It would be an opportunity to practice the method on a small project before I tackle the big project.

Links:

“旅行火星 (My Trip to Mars)” https://dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/filmlist/my-trip-to-mars/

“The Barrier” https://dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/filmlist/the-barrier/

Red Star Fly-by – Some Progress – 2018 September 23

Well, I did make some progress this week, after a week where I didn’t make any. I had run into some snags that I wasn't sure how to deal with. I had to take a break to decide what to do next.

Camera Movement

The most finicky problem was the camera movement. When I let Blender interpolate the animation, the camera movement looks "strange". So far, I haven’t come across any way to control the interpolation, other than specify more intermediate positions. I also found that I had mistyped some of the specifications for the camera movement, so I can’t put all the blame on Blender. It didn’t take me all that long to fix most of the problems. I still have more to do though. The rest seems to be more messed up, so it could take me longer.

I also adjusted the times when the camera shifted from planet to another. I wanted a more even distribution between the planets. I also wanted to cut down the time I look at the star, since it isn’t all that interesting to look at. I did a test video and I think it looks better now.

Starscape

Earlier, I created a starscape back drop. I set it up as a cylindrical image that encircles the star system I created for the animation. I felt it turned out OK. The background needs to look the same where ever the camera is positioned. When the starscape is static, there isn’t too much of a problem, but I decided it would be better to have it animated. I set it up to track the camera location, so it is always the same distance from the camera.

When I was about three quarters of the way through, I realized that I there was an easier way to do. I wasn’t all that sure it would work, so I decided to finish it the way I started.

The other problem I’ve run into with the starscape was that when I would zoom in on a planet, the stars looked bigger. That doesn’t look right. I should get a narrower range of view, but the stars shouldn’t look any larger. I haven't figured out how to deal with that yet. I want to do this because a couple of the planets are quite far away and look small. I’d like to be able to have them more visible.

Titles

In the final version I wanted to have titles giving the planets names and descriptions. The standard practice in Astronomy is to give plants letters, starting with b. I also wanted to give each planet a nickname. I came up with "Bowser", "Chuck", "Dodgeball" and "Elvis". I suppose I could have gone with Diego for “d”, but I felt that would be a bit too egotistical. I have come up with a name for the star as well, but I am just not happy with it. I also developed a star catalogue ID for it. I don’t want it to be any real system.

Planet and Moon Images

I added three moons to the system. Mostly I wanted to use them to justify illuminating the shadowed side of a couple of the planets. I had to develop surface images for them. I took the opportunity to modify the surface images for a couple of the planets too.

I’m am not very good at creating images from scratch, so I got some moon and planet images in Mercator projection that NASA created. Some of the images are easy to identify, so I tried to modify them, so they would look reasonably alien. Sometimes I altered the colors and in others I cut and pasted parts of more than one moon/planet together. I am still not 100% happy with the images I have. I may take another shot at them later.

What’s Next?

Over the next week I want to get all the camera positions fixed properly. Then I want to work on the captions and titles. I’ve started to give some thought to the sound track. I’ll likely use the same approach I used for my trip to Mars video.

I may still go back to have another look at the planet images. Once I have new images, it is relatively easy to change them. The hard part is getting the images.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

Red Star Fly-by

I was fascinated by the Breakthrough Starshot Project to send a probe to another star system. They think it will take 20 years to develop the technology, 20 to 30 years to make the trip, and 4 years to send the pictures back. By then, my age will be triple digits and I just might not be around to see it. So, I decided to create my own version of what it might look like.

I started the animation earlier this year but got distracted with other things. This week I got back to work on it. It is a simulation of what a space probe flying through an exo-stellar system would see. I used the animation program Blender.

I created mini star system in Blender. I tried to make it to scale, so the distances and plant/star sizes were appropriate. I did make the planets on the large side, so they’d show up better. I created a path for the probe and created a camera that followed the route. I had to go back to my old geometry skills to work it out. Wikipedia was very valuable.

I'd dropped it mainly because I had trouble getting the camera to point where I wanted it to point. If the probe was travelling at 20% the speed of light, it would pass through the system is about 7 minutes. At 24 frames a second, that worked out to 10710 frames. To save time, I just specified positions and orientations for only about 30 frames and let Blender interpolate the others. The interpolations were kind of wonky.

I went back and recalculated the positions and orientations for about every 48 frames, or about 190 frames. When the probe was changing direction, or rotating faster, I used shorter time intervals. For the most part it works OK now, although there are a few glitches I need to fix. Some of the interpolations are strange. I don’t understand why.

I created a star scape back ground to make it look more realistic. That took me several tries to get right. I did a test run to see how it looks. I feel good about it.

I have some other changes I’d like to make. My artistic skills leave something to be desired, so I used images of various planets and moons in our solar system. Some of them are too recognizable, so I want to find a way to make something a little more alien. I don’t know how I will do that yet.

I also want to add a few moons to the system. Mainly to help illuminate the dark sides of some planets so they’re more visible.

I hope to get this done quickly, before I get side tracked again.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

What Would Extraterrestrial Intelligences Think About Us?

From time to time, when I watch some video, or listen to some music, I wonder what an extraterrestrial intelligence might think about us if that was the only piece of information they had.

I blame that fascination on a short story I read by Arthur C. Clarke called "History Lesson". It is sometimes called "Expedition to Earth", although he wrote another story with the same title.

The gist of the story is that aliens visit the earth long after humans have died out. The only artifact they find is a single roll of movie film. They try to understand what the movie is trying to tell them. After much discussion, the story reveals the nature of the movie, and it is nothing like what the aliens thought.

I read the story once, about 47 years ago, but the idea has been stuck in my mind ever since. What would extraterrestrials make of music like "The Blue Danube", "The James Bond Theme", "She Loves You", or "Disco Duck"? What would they make of movies like "2001: A Space Odyssey", " Casablanca", "Citizen Kane", or "Plan 9 from outer space"?

Other people have had the same thought, and some have even proposed to deliberately leave a message for extraterrestrials who might find them many millennia from now.

The best-known examples are the plaques on the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 probes, and the golden records on the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes. Apparently, the New Horizons probe did not have any message on it. I always thought that it was Carl Sagan’s idea, but read recently that someone else suggested it to him. Carl was a friend of Arthur C. Clarke, so may have known the story “History Lesson”.

The record does have a range of music and sounds, but I don’t think it is as representative as we might like. It has three pieces by Bach and two by Beethoven. I do not want to put them down, but there is so much other great music from cultures throughout the world they could have chosen. Besides, to give a proper idea of humanity, some more mediocre music would be worth including.

I read that the Voyager records will last at least a billion years. So, a billion years from now, one of the Voyager records may be the only evidence that humanity ever existed.

A recent example of deliberately leaving a message is https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/a-time-capsule-launched-into-space-for-aliens-to-find-when-all-the-humans-are-gone/265718/ I believe there are other proposals along these lines, but I wasn’t able to find them in a quick search.

Several times over the years I imagined a movie based on the concept. It would be difficult to make, since although we would know the context of the surviving piece of human culture, how could we imagine realistic extraterrestrials and how they would interpret the artifact.

Another approach would be to have humans find the last remaining artifact of an earlier civilization. Although, in that case, it would not be possible to show the discrepancy between the reality of the artifact and how it is interpreted.

The idea I came up with would be to focus on a conference of extraterrestrial scientists as they argue about the meaning of the artifact. At the end of the movie, they would watch that one surviving human video: the cookie monster making cookie soup.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog