JUP48HAM8.ANIM7
This is version 2 of my first animation which was created in an attempt to
become a "real" Amiga user (i.e. one who makes animations). The animation is
a 48 frame 320x200 HAM-8 animation; any AGA amiga ought to be able to play it
back. Using ViewTek, I get neary 30 frames/second on my A1200 w/40 MHz 68030
and 4 MB 32-bit fast RAM. Because this animation has the two "looping frames"
at the end, you should use the CONT option or tooltype with ViewTek (if you in
fact use VT to view the animation).
In this animation, the point of view, or "camera," rotates in a Keplerian
orbit around a ringed gas giant. Throughout the orbit, the camera remains
looking towards the center of the planet about which it orbits. (Note that
there is nothing physically or astronomically correct about the rings; I just
made the "simple but looking kinda cool.")
The ray tracing package I used was the freely distributable POV-Ray 2.1 (which
is most definitely well worth the price!). I built up one scene that had the
gas giant and its rings in the center, the star well behind the camera, and a
ILBM of stars image mapped onto the inside of a huge sphere around the whole
system.
Next, I wrote a short program in C which solved Kepler's equation for an
inclined elliptical orbit of eccentricity 0.4 about the gas giant. This
program read in the template POV-Ray scene description I had read, and
replaced the camera position and direction with values gleaned from the
solving of Kepler's equation. It wrote out 48 scene description files for
POV-Ray, which I then rendered one by one. (Though, here, I have to admit to
cheating and using a Sparc station to do the heavy duty tracing, which
probably sped things up by an order of magnitude.)
Finally, I used ImageFX (awesome program) to produce the animation from the
individual frames.
-Rob Knop (rknop@cco.caltech.edu)
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