Late last year, lightning hit my computer. No, not my UPS protected power line. Here's a hint: Never place your computer next to an open window during an electrical storm. There was a flash in the room like someone was welding 1/2" plate, and a bang like a 12 gauge. The machine, which was off at the time, turned on. The UPS had a beep fit. Every card on the PCI bus was fried, including my $700 sound card and Adaptec Ultra-Wide. The motherboard was also toast; however, interestingly enough, the CPU, hard drive and graphics card survived, as did the power supply.
I was working on a bit of animation at the time, which was synced to both music and voice. I haven't yet replaced the sound card, so have not finished the short. I thought that there might be some interest in this piece by itself, so I am offering it here as a download. It was done with, if I remember correctly, version 2.2. A brief explanation follows.
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You can see on the jpeg to the left a capture of the layers menu. There were over 100 rocks, and each was independently animated - its rotation, rotation direction, path, scaling, etc. Due to the fact that the object will move 'as the crow flies' -there is no spline option- I divided the curved path the rocks travel into 5 arc sections, and did a Point A to Point B movement between each section. The rocks are slowed as they travel into the distance to simulate traveling over more area, though they should probably have been slowed even more. |
I drew out the arc I wanted to follow, a maximum and minimum, then laid down a mostly transparent layer inside the two arcs. This 'filled' the area, simulating dust and debris, and gave the illusion of a continuous band. Some of the rocks are placed on top of this layer, and some are placed underneath.
I used a photo of the moon for the planets surface. It isn't actually done with an image layer, but with a texture fill. I drew a circle the size I wanted to fill, and covered it with the moon as a texture. A soft edge has also been applied, giving a blurred, atmospheric effect. I had to resize the image a couple of times to get it looking the way I wanted - which included lining up the curvature of the photo to the intended curvature of my sphere. Any half-witted astronomer would immediately know that Saturn, being a gas giant, doesn't look like this at all. Actually, it isn't even suppose to be Saturn, I just titled it that way for immediate familiarity (as opposed to calling it Tantorus IV).
The stars are small dots done in Moho. After a bit of experimentation, I have found it is much easier to use a star background photo that to try to make stars in a vector program - they usually end up way to big. The best method I used, if you need a vector layer, is to draw out the star field bigger than you need and then scale it to shrink all the points.
