Recently I read somewhere, that sections of planetary rings (in this case Saturn's rings) rotate at different speeds. Saturn takes about almost 11 hours for a complete rotation. The inner rings are roughly twice as fast, whereas the outer sections take up to 17 hours for a complete rotation. That sounded quite interesting to me as an inspiration for an animation in TG. There are far more things to consider, but I worked especially on the different speeds. This is obviously not Saturn, but some imaginary planet.
For the surface I found a nice planetary texture, which I upscaled with Topaz Gigapixel. I made a displacement map from that by making it a greyscale image and additionally handpainted the crater sections black to get a more precise map.
Of course my animation is way to fast, so take it as some sort of time lapse. In this case I rendered everything separately to compose it together later, which gave me more control. I rendered 200 frame animations, which I stretched to 400 frames afterwards.
The original clip is a 18MB file, so no chance to upload it here, and compressing made it look like crap. So I put it on Vimeo. Still a lot worse than the original, but OK.
https://vimeo.com/786534387
Sounds cool, but your video is 'not yet rated', so I'll wait a while.
??? ??? ???
Do I have to do something?? I never had that before. I got an email from Vimeo, that my video is now online.
OK, should work now. I had to rate it myself.
Yeah, works. It's indeed pretty cool. Never knew it is like that, with different speeds. Some stones pop, but overall it's another great achievement!
Thanks a lot, Ulco! Yes, the popping stones issue is annoying. I wish, I could write a cache file and then animate the rotation of the pop, but this doesn't seem to work. Once written the population is not transformable.
This would be the moment for you, Ulco, to write, that it actually can be done. ;)
Come on...
;D :-X
Quote from: Hannes on January 05, 2023, 11:18:14 AMThanks a lot, Ulco! Yes, the popping stones issue is annoying. I wish, I could write a cache file and then animate the rotation of the pop, but this doesn't seem to work. Once written the population is not transformable.
This would be the moment for you, Ulco, to write, that it actually can be done. ;)
Come on...
Couldn't you do a per-frame cache and then increment the cache files?
I'm not sure what you mean, Jordan. I can create a cache file, but how do I make a per frame cache? Or increment them?
You only see them from above, so maybe a fake stone+opacity mask would work better. But maybe rotating fake stones don't work as expected...
Or make a flat ring with that pop, have them colored by their height, render a topdown so you have a heightmap, and use that as displacement on a rotating plane/card with opacity. Just a vague idea
Just now seeing this - speaking as a space nerd, I like this a lot!