Development > Artwork

MIMIR Telescope/Carrier Animation

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Winter:

--- Quote from: Psawhn on March 07, 2008, 07:29:40 pm ---The grid effect was an experiment. I guess it didn't go over too well. Here's a try with the grid set to only 10% opacity.
The timer was also originally in realtime. (Useless trivia: the camera orbits the Earth in realtime, too.) I sped it up x3 as you asked.
--- End quote ---

The camera may orbit in real time, but I find it very hard to believe that a Carrier could make turnover and disappear on the other side of the Earth in a matter of seconds, or even minutes. It would have to be going a good fraction of lightspeed in order to do that, and decelerate at hundreds of Gs so as not to overshoot Earth orbit. Even antimatter engines can't do that without getting backed up by some magitech, which we don't want.

It should probably be sped up by about 10x more.

The grid looks better at this opacity, we can keep it, but I still don't like the big circle around the Carrier in the zoomed-in run. Can you get rid of that? We're already zooming in on the thing and tracking it as it moves, we don't need any more emphasis to draw the eye to the middle of the screen.

Regards,
Winter

Psawhn:
I figured that the carrier was already heading towards the horizon as soon as it jumped in. After disappearing behind the horizon, it still had a good 30-60 minutes of deceleration time. But there's already the problem that in the wide-angle shot, the carrier's apparent size is simply too large for the craft to actually disappear behind the earth instead of plunging straight into the atmosphere.

...actually, I just realized the best solution might be to make the carrier move parallel to the horizon, instead of heading towards it. That definitely helps solve the problems of apparent size vs. realistic distances. The video can also still be realtime, because relative velocities at orbital speeds emphasize the luck and ranges of the encounter, without making it unrealistic. (It also takes it away from that stupid weird star shape near the horizon)

I can definitely get rid of the big circle, too. Its original intent was just another way to distinguish the zoomed-in shot from the wide-angle shot.

Psawhn:
Not many changes, actually. The big circle was removed, and I adjusted the times. Now it goes from 02:08 to 03:57. I had to develop a new method of making the numbers (Blender doesn't yet have an easy way of doing things like that), but now I can pretty much pop up any range of numbers, using HH:MM:SS convention quickly, for any length of time, for any range of values.

I thought of adding a date, but Alien Origins aren't researched at any set date.

https://webdisk.ucalgary.ca/~djetowns/public_html/misc_files/UFO_AI/MIMIR_final15_0001_0940.avi

Winter:
The zoom-in shows up really really blurry for me. Is that intentional? After all, this is a space telescope supposedly capable of photographing distant galaxies, it should be able to provide a clear enough picture between the Earth and Moon.

Regards,
Winter

Psawhn:
There shouldn't be anything different between this zoom in and the previous ones. The shot's blurry because I had to enlarge the picture to be seen more easily by smaller resolutions - the rendered image itself is enlarged 4x. The camera's zoomed to Blender's max, so I would have to rerender the entire shot at a higher resolution, probably putting my laptop out for a day or two, or move the camera physically closer, which may introduce some awkward movements and further reduce the correlation between the two shots.

I'm trying to maintain a balance between technical realism, astronomical realism, and artistic necessities, and the last one tends not to mix well with the previous two. :)
Without rerendering anything, the loss in resolution may be explained by the fact that both the lit side of the Earth and the Moon actually are in the picture at all, and in space those things are bright, which would probably need 2080s techonology for the telescope to even operate in those conditions. The filters and settings allowing it to take a shot without the image being hopelessly overexposed might reduce the resolution. Combined with that, this is a wide-angle shot, not a narrow-field shot used to take pictures of galaxies.

Truthfully, I think that if the telescope were looking at the settings needed to view planets and galaxies, I think the carrier would show up only as a very long streak in a single image. :)

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