Celestia Forums

Discovery EVA Pod and Monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Plus a seamless Jupiter map.

http://www.shrox.com/shx2001.zip

Don't get lost.

Love em! any chance for a Discovery Mesh as well


Tommy

I know for sure that OpenUniverse (another space simulator, sadly no longer in active development) had a Discovery 3D model. I'm sure all we have to do is ask for it...

By the way, there might be other resources that OpenUniverse developers might want to share with us, namely textures (there was a very good hi-res texture pack) and 3D models for some bodies... I think I have it installed, so I'll look around. More news later...

Bruckner

OpenUniverse had the following textures, which we don't:

- Castalia (asteroid): 256x256, 16.7 kB.
- Gaspra (asteroid): 256x256, 29 kB.
- Hyperion (Saturn's satellite): 256x256, 23.9 kB.
- Janus (Saturn's satellite): 256x256, 19.3 kB.
- Prometheus (Saturn's satellite): 256x256, 14 kB.
- Proteus (Neptune's satellite): 256x256, 19.5 kB (*)
- Toutatis (asteroid): 256x256, 19.9 kB.

(*): Celestia doesn't have a texture for Proteus, but I found a better one than OpenUniverse's that will be published shortly.

The 3D models:

- Apollo 13.
- Discovery (the ship from '2001').
- a Space Shuttle (don't know which one).
- Space Station V (from '2001').

The format of the files for the 3D models is unknown to me (BMF), but that shouldn't come as a surprise for anyone, since 3D models is a field totally unknown to me .

These would be interesting additions to Celestia, and OpenUniverse authors may be willing to contribute (just go to http://www.openuniverse.org/ and see for yourselves).

Best regards...

Bruckner

Yes, I have looked at the OU models and I did not think them to good. I have many hi rez models that I have built. They just have to be dumbed down alittle (or allot). The Discovery in OU is not very detailed really. I have one I am touching up. I had sent Chris an Apollo and a Skylab sometime ago, he is probably sitting on the and letting them out a little at a time. Most (practically all) of the time I just end up building my own model anyway.

I discovered a bug in Celestia's 3DS mesh reading code that makes the Skylab model look ugly (it affects the quality of the Gemini model too, but not quite as badly.) It was an easy bug to fix, and I'll be putting the Apollo and Skylab models up once the next version of Celestia is released.

The OpenUniverse models are stored in BMF files, a custom format which only OpenUniverse can read. In any case, I agree with Shrox that most of the models aren't detailed enough to fuss about including in Celestia.

I've corresponded a lot with Raul and Axel from OpenUniverse. They're cool guys and quite willing to share any textures or models.

--Chris

That pod model is beautiful . . . I'll create an ssc for it and the monolith. Anyone care to speculate on the radius of the monolith's orbit around Jupiter?

--Chris

Ok . . . I just hacked together an ssc file for the monolith and pod:

http://www.shatters.net/celestia/files/2001.ssc

Here's a screen shot:

http://www.shatters.net/celestia/images/monolith.jpg

--Chris

shx2001.zip now includes Chris' 2001.ssc

Hey, isn't it supposed to be blacker? and full of stars?

Looks great! I hate to be a nit-picker but wasn't the monolith a lot closer to Jupiter? (at least it looked like it in the movie)
Does anyone know the distance that the monolith was supposed to be? I can't recall whether they mentioned it in the movie. Just curious where you got the orbital data.

Anyways, congrats shrox and Chris for these fine add-ons. I'm a firm 2001 fan.

Fleegle

Feel free to use as much OpenUniverse stuff as you want. Most 3D models in OU are low detail (keep in mind it was tuned for TNT2-era cards) but i have the high detail versions somewhere, just drop me a note and i'll dig the HD

BTW, there's a very nice web page with loads of 2001 stuff (that's where i d/l OU models from):

http://www.strafe.com/2001/index.shtml


Hey, put the monolith orbiting Saturn, that's the way it'd have to be in the film but , you know, Jupiter seemed much easier to model at that time (the 60s)

shrox wrote:shx2001.zip now includes Chris' 2001.ssc

Your jupiter.jpg looks nicer than the default one in the medres folder. However, the position of the red spot appears shifted by ~440 px, indicating a shift in longitude. Which one is correct??

Fridger

>>> BTW, there's a very nice web page with loads of 2001 stuff
(that's where i d/l OU models from):

I took the model from this site for the Space Station (the "wheel"), and
exported it as 3ds (I know it's not licensed for Celestia use, but it's an
excellant test for importing 3ds files to display in Celestia). I made a
2001.ssc file, but for some reason I can't see the model (see below).
(But, Celestia is not crashing)

ARE the maps for a 3ds model files looked for in Celestia? Where -
in the medres folder - or maybe the model folder? Is the following
ssc file not correct? - maybe somebody can figure out how to make
it spin and orbit as originally depicted (let alone show up)...

# 2001 Space Wheel Station

"Wheel" "Sol/Earth"
{
Mesh "wheel.3ds"
Radius 0.025

# Similiar to Skylab.
EllipticalOrbit {
Period 0.065
SemiMajorAxis 6813
Eccentricity 0
Inclination 60
AscendingNode 96
ArgOfPericenter 131
MeanAnomaly 40
}

Albedo 0.05
}

Vic

Raul. wrote:Hey, put the monolith orbiting Saturn, that's the way it'd have to be in the film but , you know, Jupiter seemed much easier to model at that time (the 60s) :twisted:

Actually, in the novel the big monolith was standing on the surface of Iapetus, at the center of the light-colored hemisphere.

I think Douglas Trumbull did shoot some test footage of Saturn, but it wasn't used in the movie... eventually he made his own (not as good) movie called "Silent Running" that had a lot of Saturn in it.

Another bit of "2001" movie trivia: Jupiter wasn't done with a physical model, but with slit-scan optical techniques similar to those used to shoot the "stargate" sequence-- in a way it was an analog ancestor of CGI texture mapping.

http://www.sciflicks.com/2010/images/2010_09.html

Here's a link to an image from 2010 which maybe gives an idea how far away the monolith is from Jupiter?

Fleegle wrote:Looks great! I hate to be a nit-picker but wasn't the monolith a lot closer to Jupiter? (at least it looked like it in the movie)
Does anyone know the distance that the monolith was supposed to be? I can't recall whether they mentioned it in the movie. Just curious where you got the orbital data.

Anyways, congrats shrox and Chris for these fine add-ons. I'm a firm 2001 fan.

Fleegle

There is a referrence to Discovery's orbit and the monolith's in the book 2010 (I remeber Discovery's orbit was decaying into Io) can't help any further can't find my book, but on the topic of 2010 does anyone know of a 3ds mesh of the Lenin. It is a much more interesting craft.

Kevin