Early engine prototype

This is a tracking shot, watching the moon Europa (ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE) from the surface of Io - the most volcanic object in the Solar System. Simple lighting has been applied to the scene from the direction of the Sun, which at over 750 million kilometres away from the camera is well outside of the range of the renderer*. At times, you can see the moons Callisto & Ganymede (both around the size of Mercury) in the background. Jupiter itself dominates the sky.

The shaking is caused by a mixture of accuracy errors in floating point maths and the camera position not being updated perfectly in synchronisation with the motion of the planets & moons. It's far less obvious when the timescale isn't quite so compressed - at the moment this scene is running at around a day per minute.

The background is a skysphere centred on the camera and set to a short distance, but drawn as a background with z-sorting disabled. The texture is from the very awesome http://skysurvey.org/

The bodies are textured with an accurate 2048x1024 png sourced mainly from various NASA exploration missions and everything is drawn to scale.

The next phase of development will be to move the planetary objects out of the renderer, use some logic to centre the camera at the coordinate 0,0,0 and then scale & translate all visible bodies so that they are correctly z sorted but drawn at a maximum distance of somewhere between 1,000km & 10,000km. By doing this the Z-Buffer on the graphics card will be useful and can be used for a variety of effects and accurate picking. Further optimisations will be to draw bodies that are only filling a couple of pixels as imposters.

Impressively, this is all achieved in 70 lines of Python code.

*It's possible to set the cameras focal distance to render objects as far as way as the Sun, but at the expense of further scaling issues in the local area.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• panda3d
• python
• 3d
• graphics
• demo