BlindedByTheLight wrote:Regarding building a solar system and capturing a movie.... What platform are you on? Not all platforms have a functional movie capture function. Also it really sounds like you are just trying to make a little animation movie. Perhaps someone else could weigh in on some simple animation software that would make the job easier? And, finally, it sounds like you might want to try tweaking around with the SSC files for the orbiting bodies in our solar system. You might be able to do it yourself pretty easily - though I'm still not totally clear on what you're asking. Hope that helps.
Ok, so i try to explain better.
I use Celestia on WinXP, and capturing movie works well (at least as uncompressed avi). Then i reduce it at a size agreable by my PDA. The whole process works very good, so there's no need for clues about.
I then try to better explain what i'm asking.
Right now, i "GO" to the earth, i choose a good view, i speed up the time and i grab a movie of the earth/moon mini-system.
Then i open my video editor and i start searchig the right start/end frames do make a looping animation: there's no way to do that, 'cause the clouds, the moon, the shadows are never in the same position all toghether.
So i start thinking about how to do that. I, with my skills, can only thinks two solutions:
a) Building a whole solar system in a 3D designer and make my animations in this way. It's a lot of work, mostly tedious.
b) Keeping the great "flexibilty" and visual stunning of celestia and tampering with SSC files...or scripts?.... what's the best way? to archieve my goal.
So, what exactly i will like to have is (keepeing the Earth as example):
A Fake Solar system with a Earth fixed in its position (not orbiting around the sun).
Then i will like to alter the moon orbit, the clouds movement and so on so i can have the same image each (say) 28 days. So i can capture a 30 days lenght movie and find the identical frames to make a looping movie.
If lookin at the Earth seems (SEEMS) simple, i'm wondering what kind of orbits the Jovian moons needs to achieve the same result: they're so much, so i need to compute each orbit to have, every N jovian days, the same, exactly "image".
My difficults starts from the beginning (i still don't know the best method to do that) and ends with the hardest part: cumpute orbits, vectors and so on.
It's not my bread, and it's not something i'm able to do right now.
My knowledge is so little that i can't ever understand if this is something celestia can do, and what grade of difficulty have this "goal".
Thanks for your attention
