Stephen <mca### [at] aolcom> wrote:

> Is that what your animation is doing, increasing the data sets as well
> as position?
> I expected to see a band of rocks constantly orbiting between Mars and
> Jupiter.

Nope, I just did that in the testing phases to make sure my interpretation and
implementation of the 6 orbital elements wasn't WAY off.
Still working on that "Mean anomaly at the epoch" part.
I'm guessing that's it's position at some well-defined time-point.


> I was going to say that it might be quicker if you could load the data
> into a Virtual disk. But that would take up more memory. :(

I'd thought of something like that - maybe a RAM disk, a SSD, or a USB3 stick.
The parsing takes longer than the data reading.
The number of spheres isn't TOO bad - considering my rgb histogram analysis
processes millions of them for certain images. (it just takes forever)

> Maybe one of the smart people could help.

Be sure to take your frog pills today.
And wipe your chin.


> I knew there were a lot but seeing a visualisation puts it in
> perspective. I wonder if there is an available data set of all the space
> junk whizzing around the Earth?


I think that there is.   Likely even Google has some of it.

I need to figure out how to reject badly-formed data, like the E's, the MPE's,
the MPO's, etc in the data set, so I don't have to manually delete them.
I also need to figure out how to plot the objects that look like they have
parabolic paths.   I haven't yet reasoned that out or investigated the equations
and parameters for those yet.
I can't imagine that there are things with hyperbolic orbits - but the universe
is a surprising place.

So, I have the planets, a lot of the moons, and asteroids.

UV mapping of the planets and moons.
(BTW, I really like the way your Earth looks with the normal mapping - I haven't
gotten that far yet)

A realistic starfield in the background would be nice - esp if there were some
actual constellations in approx the right place.  That would make a very nice
sky_sphere indeed.
Not sure what else to throw in there - galaxies, nebulae - not sure what's large
enough to be seen (if I fudge the scaling like I do with the planets and
moons...)

Comets would be very cool, and some of the man-made-satellite models as well.

Also on the list is a nice fly-through path for the camera to travel through the
solar system and pause around each planetary system for a bit.


I suppose each data set for each set of objects could be worked out, and
included in the central scene file.  Things like the asteroids could be limited
with a bailout number - which I already have implemented.

..... and if things get too unwieldly, we can always have Dick Balaska do all the
animation frames on his render farm  ;)   :D

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