See "Making an Asteroid Belt" (30 Jun. 2003) at p.g.

   Sputnik

Post a reply to this message

Attachments:
Download 'EggySolarSystem.jpg' (46 KB)

Preview of image 'EggySolarSystem.jpg'

Cool image.
I won't bother you with scale considerations, but I have a few astonomic 
remarks:
- Where is mercury ? (or where is Venus ?) There should be two planets 
within Earth's orbit.
- Mars has two small satellites.
- Jupiter has some 13 or 14 satellites, but it's true that it wouldn't 
look so nice to model them all. Saturn has a lot of satellites too in 
addition to the rings.
- Uranus and Pluto are missing, they are a bit further away but you 
could put them in the upper right corner.
- The sun shouldn't have a shadow on it as it is itself a high intensity 
light source, you should try to give it a ambient of 1.0 and even 
simulate the intense light with some media. You should also set the it 
to be the main light for your scene.

I know that you just want to model the asteroid belt, but I can't really 
say nothing when whole planets are missing.  :-)

As for the belt, you can try a lot (1000-10000) of little spheres, but 
that will be difficult to animate, so you can try some spheres and a 
toric media to simulate smaller particles. If you find spheres too 
regular you can use isosurfaces.

JC



> See "Making an Asteroid Belt" (30 Jun. 2003) at p.g.
> 
>    Sputnik
> 
> 
>

Post a reply to this message

Ahh !!! Ohh !!! These are eggs !! That's why thought the sun had a 
shadow ! Much of my remarks fall into obslescence then ...

I like the idea of eggy-planets, eggs express the potentiality for life ...

JC

JC (Exether) wrote:
> Cool image.
> I won't bother you with scale considerations, but I have a few astonomic 
> remarks:
> - Where is mercury ? (or where is Venus ?) There should be two planets 
> within Earth's orbit.
> - Mars has two small satellites.
> - Jupiter has some 13 or 14 satellites, but it's true that it wouldn't 
> look so nice to model them all. Saturn has a lot of satellites too in 
> addition to the rings.
> - Uranus and Pluto are missing, they are a bit further away but you 
> could put them in the upper right corner.
> - The sun shouldn't have a shadow on it as it is itself a high intensity 
> light source, you should try to give it a ambient of 1.0 and even 
> simulate the intense light with some media. You should also set the it 
> to be the main light for your scene.
> 
> I know that you just want to model the asteroid belt, but I can't really 
> say nothing when whole planets are missing.  :-)
> 
> As for the belt, you can try a lot (1000-10000) of little spheres, but 
> that will be difficult to animate, so you can try some spheres and a 
> toric media to simulate smaller particles. If you find spheres too 
> regular you can use isosurfaces.
> 
> JC
> 
> 

> 
>> See "Making an Asteroid Belt" (30 Jun. 2003) at p.g.
>>
>>    Sputnik
>>
>>
>>
> 
>

Post a reply to this message

Frank, as I said before, I am pleased with the code you gave me. Here is my
first attempt at using it in my orrery, as you can see it is still WIP. I
increased the number of spheres to 10,000. I was surprised at the speed there is
an insignificant increase from using a disc.

Regards
        Stephen

Post a reply to this message

Some eggs are round.

Post a reply to this message

Post a reply to this message

Attachments:
Download 'orrery06a.png' (118 KB)

Preview of image 'orrery06a.png'

> Some eggs are round.

You mean spherical? Maybe, but none of those in my picture :). Some
of them *seem* to be round because of resolution, JPEG, shadows and
when looking onto their top, but they all have the same eggy shape.

   Sputnik

Post a reply to this message

Hi Stephen,

I've googled for "number density asteroids" and found this:
http://www.cen.uiuc.edu/~sulfridg/asteroid/asteroid.html
There is a picture displaying *real* positions of the asteroids and a
map of the density of asteroids as a function of distance from the sun.
Shapes, sizes and colors also are shown.

Have you seen the thread "Isosurface approximation" of Kevin Loney,
started yesterday in p.b.i? His example object looks very "asteroidic"
(but will render slower than simple spheres).

   Sputnik

Post a reply to this message

Hi!

> - Where is mercury ?

Mercury is where it belongs: in *real* space! :)

> - Uranus and Pluto are missing

"Oh noooo, I've destroyed 2 planets!"
<looking through a telescope>
"You are wrong -- they are where they have to be!" :-D


<serious mode>

> - Jupiter has some 13 or 14 satellites

According to "Sterne und Weltraum"-Special 7: "Monde" (Oct. 2002) about
moons, 101 moons were known in the solar system at that time, jupiter
has 39 (more than half of them found 2000 and 2001, diameter 2 to 7 km),
saturn has 30. Probably some more have been found since then, and Cassini
(launched oct. 1997) will investigate the moons of saturn (beginning next
summer) and surely find more moons of saturn.

You have overlooked that the most important satellite is missing: earth's
moon! The tiny dot near the "earth" is *not* the moon, it's *me* (i.e.
Sputnik) -- see attached picture!

As I wrote in p.g, my picture was a quick easter joke (only a WIP: the
orbits aren't egg-shaped yet, two antennas of the sputnik aren't attached
to it's main body and I'm not satisfied with many of the textures. I'll
occasionally work on this to finish it before easter next year). So I
wanted to make a funny picture, not a realistic solar system.

Realism would mean to have a huge picture with single-pixel planets:

(mean distance of mercury and sun) : (mean distance of pluto and sun)
= 57.9E6 km : 5900E6 km
(roughly) = 1 : 100

(diameter of pluto) : (mean diameter of pluto orbit)
= 1530 km : 11.8E9 km
(roughly) = 1 : 8,000,000

So pluto in a +W8000000 picture of the solar system would have a diameter
of only 1 pixel!


   Sputnik

Post a reply to this message

Attachments:
Download 'EggySputnik.jpg' (8 KB)

Preview of image 'EggySputnik.jpg'

Post a reply to this message