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
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