Dancing Solar System needs some help with planet motion

[djTL]

[Narei]

[djTL]

[andff]

[Narei]

[andff]

[djTL]

I uploaded a slightly modified version of andff's scene to deviantart. Not many changes, just added some planetary textures and a couple of sliders for distance and togglable trajectories for the planets.



I'll have to goof around with this. The breakdown of the planets with their rotations and orbits is very helpful, andff. This could end up being a good tutorial scene.

Some remixes of this scene with different textures and maybe some of the flaring effects like recursive cube painter would look pretty awesome. They could have some grandiose astronomy names -- Quasar Mix, Gas Giant Remix, etc, etc.

[djTL]

I'm not sure how to do this with the gl models, but I have another texture of just clouds for Earth. I was wondering if it would be possible to place it in another transparent sphere slightly larger than the Earth to give it the illusion of having an atomosphere?

Also, updated the deviantart file with a slightly greener Venus texture, cloud texture (sol_earth_clouds.jpg) and wider planetary orbits.

[Narei]

To quote someone that commented in the DA link: "You forgot to upload the actual visualization,there is just a .jpg on the download button..."

You didn't say where you got your textures from, but FYI, NASA doesn't maintain copyrights on their images. You can go on to their site and maybe poke around for some actual planetary pics and test them out as textures and be able to use them royalty free. This even includes their 3D models, so you could have a little satillite floating around as well.

Info about usage and links to textures/models

[djTL]

Oops. I got burned updating a scenepack for deviantart before. You think I would have learned. Should be fixed now.

I didn't get the files directly from NASA -- someone at a university did the legwork for me and had it on their site. I love the idea of having tiny satellites orbiting the Earth -- maybe a remix of this scene could have Earth with the moon and a bunch of satellites dancing around it. Something to work on later, once I'm done figuring out how andff worked his Deep Magic...

[Narei]

That sounds nice and quirky. And about the clouds thing, couldn't you make another "planet" section in the script with all the same stuff as the one for Earth, only with a larger model to put the texture on? I do think you'll have to also make sure the non cloud portion of your cloud texture would need to have alpha transparency or make a mask for it so it will show through to the earth.

[djTL]