Project 1

Planet Animation | January 31, 2019

Part 1

For the first part of the project, I followed the tutorial for the Planet Animation in Introducing Autodesk Maya 2016 by Dariush Derakshani.

Part 2

The three main elements added or modified for the second part of the project were planetary textures, revolution starting point/velocity, and tilting of Saturn's rings and Uranus's moon orbits.

Textures

I added realistic textures to all the planets and moons using image files loaded into a lambert material in Hypershade. The Earth and Venus required a layeredShader material in order to show both the surface and the atmosphere.

All surface images and the background can be found here: https://www.solarsystemscope.com/textures/

Venus

The Earth and Moon

Full Solar System View

Revolution Starting Point/Velocity

In the original tutorial, all planet revolved around the sun twice in the 240 frames, and all started on the x-axis. To add a realistic element, I started the animation with the planets randomly dispersed around the sun, and made the revolutionary velocity of each planet slower than the one before it, i.e. Jupiter revolves more slowly than Mars which revolves more slowly than Earth and so on.

Revolution is not to scale, otherwise Mercury would complete over 1,028 orbits around the Sun before Pluto would complete one.

Tilting

To create a more realistic animation, I added a tilt to Saturn's rings (which I doubled) by rotating each in both the x- and z-direction. I changed the revolution of Uranus's moons around the planet by having them revolve in the z-direction as opposed to the y-direction. This helps mimic Uranus's sideways axis of rotation.

Saturn and two of its moons

Uranus and two of its moons

Additional changes to look out for:

Each planet's rate of rotation is slightly different
Venus's rotation is clockwise, whereas all other planets are counterclockwise
The sun rotates, too (counterclockwise, of course!)
When a planet has two moons, the moons were altered to be different sizes, and have different revolution distances and velocities
The background includes stars and the Milky Way

Overhead View

Front View

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