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.