Solar System

This week we were given an assessment task to create a model of the solar system; this work would test our use of scale to actually scale the planets in relation to each over.

This task was pretty straight forward in terms of modelling; we just had to create spheres to represent each of the planets and the sun.

The difficult part came in when we had to create the planets a accurate to scale, but luckily there was a similar task in the recommended reading, a booked called introduction to Maya 2013.

In this book was a similar task of recreating the solar system to scale and it provided a scale of the planets, which I used for this task.

The first part of the task was easy, I created each of the planets using a sphere, each sphere would have a radius of 1 but I would adjust the scale of each separately, the Sun being the biggest had a scale of 4, and Pluto the smallest had a scale of 0.15.

The next part would be to distance each planet form each other correctly, a problem with this is that if I used the same scale I did for the size of the planets they would be so far apart they would not be visible from each over. To compensate for this I used a different scale that the size of the planets, but the distance between each other would still be importation.

I used a scaled 1 tenth that of the scale the planets, even with this reduced scale some of the outer planets of the solar system are so far away that the sun is hardly visible.

Once I had the planets created and in position I textured them, I searched on-line for available textures and found a website that had the textures for each of the planets, this website is http://planetpixelemporium.com/planets.html .

For each of the planets and the sun I then applied the respecting textures, A problem I came across while doing this was that the textures where not aligned properly on the spheres so that the top and bottom of the textures representing the north and south poles of the planets where forming a vertical line from top to bottom of the sphere as show by the images below.

To fix this I edited a setting on the place2Dtextuer node of the material to rotate the textures 90° so that they were positioned correctly as show in the image above.

 

Links:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6112339/3d%20Modeling%20%26%20Animation/Solar%20System.zip