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Planetary Survey

For my Astronomy 202 class I was assigned to make a creative project. Working with another person I knew in the class, Joshua Harrison, we decided to make a short CG movie about a planetary survey. As the project progresses I'll update this page more.

I started out by using a modified version of my Lith-Igno Heavy Cruiser as the main ship design. I stripped off all the weapon looking objects thinking it looks the most like a "near future" ship.

Since the whole short movie was going to be CG we used several different programs to make different aspects of the movie. For the models of ships and other space craft we used Bryce 5; I also had the models made in that. For most of the scenery shots including starfields and plantery scenes we used another program called Vue d'Esprit. For the inside shots of the ship's bridge Josh used 3D Studio Max.

The picture on the left was a still made in Vue d'Esprit. This was used in a scene where the ship made a fly-by underneath the camera towards the planet. The actual compositing took place in Final Cut Pro HD.

The plot behind the movie is a fairly simple concept. As part of an expidentiary team the crew of the explorer ship Icarus is scouting out planets for future human colonisation. This movie chronicals the crew's mission to survey the planet Celonam IV in the system of the same name.

On the right is a picture of the bridge of the explorer ship Icarus. The green block is a green screen which will allow us to play other movies over it giving the effect that we're looking at the ship's view screen.

During the movie the crew of the Icarus will launch several probes, seen below, to both the planet and the system's sun. When images are sent back to the ship we'll have them displayed on the green screen.

Josh is also working on creating people in another program called Poser to populate the bridge of our ship.

Since we're working with fiction Josh found a program that would create planet surfaces on the fly, giving us this picture. In Bryce I took the picture and applied it to a sphere allowing me to have a planet and a cross section to talk about.