"Clarence1898" <dle### [at] comcastnet> wrote:
> "Bald Eagle" <cre### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
> > "Clarence1898" <dle### [at] comcastnet> wrote:
> > > This is a project I started over 20 years ago by modeling an orrery.
> >
> > And you're still at it!  Good work.
> >
> > It's been a long time since I've seen one of these classic animations.
> >
> > >Then had
> > > to figure out a scene to put it in.  This is what I finally came up with.  Turn
> > > looping on in your player.  I would get stuck on it, or real life interrupted,
> > > put aside for a few years then repeat.  I'm not very happy with the clouds the
> > > camera flies through, not enough turbulence.
> >
> > Clouds are notoriously difficult.
> >
> > >There is also some flickering I
> > > haven't been able to get rid of.
> >
> > I didn't really notice anything, so it must be a very small problem.
> >
> > >The camera has a couple of abrupt moves I need
> > > to smooth out.
> >
> > When you're about to make a sharp turn, slow down the camera dramatically.
> > Look into "smoothing functions" to get the sort of thing you want.
> >
> > >I do plan to add more objects to the scene.  Any comments or
> > > suggestions would be welcome.
> >
> > I like the island a LOT.
> > The house, the working lighthouse (make the light MUCH brighter), the ceiling
> > fan, the periodic table, the stencil on the desk....
> >
> > The orrery sun could be a bit brighter/yellower.
> >
> > I like the checkered bed.  Perhaps a silvery pillow would be a nice "easter egg"
> > nod to the RSOCP.  It's always fun to sneak some classic POV-Ray / computer
> > graphics models, or someone else's POV-Ray model/effect into a scene.
> >
> > If you hit any more stumbling blocks, don't be afraid to ask for ideas or
> > solutions.  Set your goal on the finish line!
> >
> > - BE
>
> Thank you for the suggestions.  I made a few changes and reposted a new
> animation.  The flickering is much more noticeable at higher resolutions, I
> rendered the animation at 1280x720 then reduced it to 640x360 to get the size
> down for posting.  The planet maps came from a NASA web site, I picked a new sun
> that is brighter and yellower.  It does look better.  The checkered bed was a
> nod to the RSOCP, but the pillow reflects the creme colored walls not the bed
> and it almost looks translucent not reflective.  At the time I created the
> lighthouse I didn't know the color rgb values could be greater than 1.0.  I
> increased the value and it looks much better.  I wrote a program to generate the
> island,  started with a pyramid and recursively divided the faces into smaller
> triangles and translating the vertices a random amount up or down and then
> created a mesh2 object.  I then populated the island with 24000 trees and 32000
> bushes that were created by Arbaro 2.0.  Now I need to work on the camera
> transitions.

In trying to reduce the flicker, I rendered at 3840x2160 then scaled it down to
640x360.  It didn't eliminate all the flickering but did reduce it a lot.  That
cut the size down from 42MB to a more reasonable 3.4MB.  I was also able to
smooth the transition when the camera entered earth orbit.  Still not completely
happy with it, but I think its looking better.

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Download 'island640.mp4.dat' (3421 KB)