This is an animation of a moon going around an Earth-like planet. The full
animation is 153 frames of 687x565 24-bit images. These MPEGs are basically
half-size versions of this, compressed into MPEG-1 format. The full_orbit is
the full 153-frames long and the shorter one is only 100 frames long, but
captures all but the last second or two of the planets rotation. 

I set up the objects, keyframes etc. for the base animation. I did this as a
test of several things:I've never really gotten a chance to wring ScedA out
to my satisfaction and I'd just recently acquired a new SGI Indy and wanted
to play so this seemed like a cool short way to test things out.

Credit where credit is due:
Larry Gritz for his awesome BMRT Renderman implementation. Tal Lancaster and
Ken Musgrave, from whom I stole most of the shaders and occasional RIB chunks
from for the attribute assignments to the various heavenly bodies.  Finally,
props to Denis for his ScedA animation system for working with Steve Chenney's
cool Sced modeller.


This animation was modelled using ScedA on an SGI 32MB Indy and rendered
over 14 hours using the BMRT implementation of Renderman. It was assembled
using SGI MovieMakerand compressed with the MediaConvert tool.  


Coming soon: The sky is falling! A hail of asteroids crosses this little
planetary system plunging to a fiery death in the atmosphere of the planet...

Comments, questions, Palm D'Ors, laughter or vague threats may be directed to:
armadillo@snm.com

----Steve