Planetary orbits and Yaw, Pitch, Roll

[TheBadger]

Hello,

There has been discussion on what I will ask about here. But Im just getting into it, so I am not sure which threads to follow yet.

I want to simulate the filming of a planetary body from another planetary body. For example, from the perspective of an asteroid sized moon, of a large planet. Or even from a spacecraft of some kind.
The planet is spinning naturally, and the moon is also in motion around the planet. The moon/ship perhaps would have yaw and pitch, maybe roll too.

So I need to know if the planet can rotate with everything that goes with the planet. And if I use a planet object shrunk down to an Asteroid size as the moon, can that be put on an animated path around the main planet? And then also rotated?

I think right now I just want to understand how I can get the objects (planet and satellite) to move in relation to one another. I know I could fake a rotating planet simply by rotating the camera with a black background and then posting in stars and rotating them at a different rate. But I would like to try the simulation based on a degree of real movement.

Does the way I am asking this make sense, and if so, is it possible ?

I was inspired by a HD vid clip I saw someplace, shot from the ISS. In the video it looked to me that some time laps was used, but it could be that things were really moving very fast, I just don't know. For this test project, it may be nice to have everything moving very quickly?

Any ideas on this are welcome.

Thanks.

[cyphyr]

It should be possible, although Terragen is not the ideal program to do this in. In the planet node there are two tick boxes, "Translate textures with planet" and "Rotate textures with planet", these both would need to be ticked. To do the actual animation I would create some proxies in a third part application (I use Lightwave but anything that can export a .chan file would work just as well), these could be "nulls" or simple low poly objects, animate those and export a .chan file for each objects movements and rotation. You could do the same for the camera if you wanted.

As I mentioned at the start Terragen is not the ideal program for this since it dose not have any parenting of objects to objects (pretty essential to get orbits to work) and position resolution drops right off the further you get from the origin. This second point could be helped by making your planets very small, scaling your entire scene down by a factor of a 1000 or more. The lack of parenting could be ameliorated by simply only showing small parts of an orbit, implying the orbit rather than showing all of it.

A last point, I have a memory of reading that the "Translate textures with planet" and "Rotate textures with planet" was broken! I hope I'm wrong about that.

Hope this helps a bit.

Cheers

Richard

[TheBadger]

It helps Richard, thank you.
When I was constructing in my mind how I thought I could go about doing it, I already thought it would be hard. Now I think its too hard.

Still, maybe some part of it like you suggest. Have to rethink the idea to something more simple.

[Oshyan]

I would question whether Terragen would be the best application for this. If you're trying to render a highly realistic planet with volumetric clouds, and the effects of that *will be evident from your camera's perspective*, then yes, perhaps it is. But honestly from space, if you're not making a closer approach to the planet, the differences that TGs rendering capabilities are going to bring over, say, a simple 3DS Max setup with a translucent sphere faking the atmosphere, and a basic cloud map, may not be that much. It would render faster and be easier to setup using simple models in a generalized 3D app like Max, in that case.

- Oshyan

[TheBadger]

Yeah 

I think in just terms of the mechanics of the movements involved AfterEffects is "my" best path forward. That would actually be easy as pie. At least in terms of the grand wide shot stuff where the main planet dose not fill the background of the frame.
But there is no way the planet will look any place near as good up close as it would from TG2, just not possible.

Now if there is a way to make texture maps of a fully built TG2 planet including clouds and whatever else, to use on my AE planet object. Then it would be a pretty quick and simple process to mach up the AfterEffects work, with a TG2 render sequence. Where the animation from after effects is used for establishing/ super wide/ far shots, and TG2 for the close up detail work.

So how to get my planet in AE to look like its the same planet from TG2? I know that I can use maps on sphere/planet02 objects in AfterEffects just as I can in TG2 (basically). But how do I get usable maps from TG2?