Project 1: Solar System

Kristine Tseng 2/5/2020

Part 1

For the first animation I followed the directions in Chapter 2 of the textbook.

Part 2

For the second animation I tried to go for a space western theme starring the sun as the titular cowboy. I wanted to show a scene where the sun has successfully lassoed Saturn for its ring.

The music is taken from the song "Big Enough" by Kirin J Callinan.

The three changes I made are listed below.

1. Add a background

The background image is a picture of a cowboy taken from the music video for Big Enough with an image of space on top of it.

I added the background as an Image Plane, sized it to fit the screen, and increased the depth so the planets wouldn't run into it when they orbit.

2. Give the sun a hat

To identify the sun as the main character and a cowboy, I gave it a cowboy hat to set it apart from the other planets.

The cowboy hat was a free model I found online and imported into the scene. I resized it, placed it on top of the sun, and gave it a Lambert shader to make it brown. I also made it rotate with the sun to make it look like the sun's gaze is tracking Saturn.

3. Add and animate the lasso

I created the lasso by making a long stretched out cylinder with one end attached to the sun and the other end attached to Saturn. Just the cylinder by itself is very flat and rigid, so I tried to animate it so it swings like a real rope.

I first added height subdivisions onto the cylinder mesh so it has points that can move. The images below show the cylinder in wireframe view. The first picture shows what it looked like before without the subdivisions and the second shows what it looked like after I added more subdivisions.

I added an nCloth to the cylinder by selecting the cylinder and clicking Create nCloth. At this point when playing the animation, the cylinder just falls down to the grid below because it is not attached to anything, so I attached one end of the cylinder to the Sun and the other end to Saturn. I did this by selecting the parts I wanted to attach to each other and clicking nConstraint > Point to Surface. The following two images shows what each end of the cylinder looked like in wireframe mode after I attached them to the sun and Saturn.

Once the cylinder was attached to moving objects, it looked a little more like a rope with some weight and swing that responded to Saturn's movement around the sun. I went into the nCloth settings for the cylinder to experiment with the presets to see which ones I thought made the most rope-like effect. I ended up choosing burlap because I thought it looked slightly heavier and less bouncy than the softer options like silk, but not as rigid as leather.

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