Sunday, March 13, 2011

Hot Summer on Furaha

While thinking of new posts, I finally took some scenes I had prepared much earlier and assembled them. I have tried my hand at making animations before (here and here), but will stop doing so for a while. The program I used to to define plants (XFrog), does not allow for a full wind animation, and without that you cannot really animate natural scenes well. Vue Infinite, the program I used to render scenes, can in fact take care of moving foliage quite well, but its plant editor is sadly not open enough to allow me to define interesting alien plants. That is the main reason that this scene depicts a hot day: there is no wind at all. For fairly obvious reasons there are no animals to speak of, or at least none galloping through the landscape. You will need your imagination for that, I am afraid.

When an animation is lacking in movement it cannot work very well. Then again, I did like the way the 'time lapse' scenes came out, particularly the one in which you see the planet spinning during the night. The direction of movement of the stars (straight up) tells you that we are near the equator.

[Later addition: I guess I did not pay enough attention to logic. In the last scene you see the sun setting at a fairly low angle. If we would really have been near the equator, as suggested by the movement of the stars at night, the sun should dive towards the horizon at a more or less right angle...]


Anyway, here it is. There is a large ballont passing by, and look out, or rather, keep an ear out for splatterbugs at sunset.

There is a larger version on YouTube.


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