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1991-08-02
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08-03-91 03:56
Some info about FLIby:
I hope you enjoy this nice, albeit brief voyager-like overpass of a ray-
traced saturn-like world orbiting a distant binary star system. This is
hardly intended to be a scientifically accurate simulation, but merely an
attempt to educate myself on the finer points of ray-trace animation.
This is the first 'movie' I've created with Autodesk Animator, and
therefore I didn't make use of any of its' fancier features. The entire
file took me about 2 days (or so) to make. I made the images a little dark for
the average monitor, so it wouldn't hurt to play with the contrast and
brightness controls on your monitor to allow you to see more detail.
The "probe" approaches the planet rapidly, and whizzes past it on a
perfectly straight course. It makes two slight 'roll' corrections during the
length of the approach. The planet stays in the center of your screen because
the probe is turning 'a la voyager' to keep it that way. As you pass the planet,
the twin stars will come into view, a blue supergiant and a red giant. The red
giant is on the opposite side of the star, which is why it appears as a mere
point of light. This is a lonely intergalactic system, tens of thousands of
parsecs from the nearest galaxy, which is why no distant stars are visible.
(Yeah, that's it.)
In the future, I will be creating a much longer ray-traced movie which
will make use of other ray-tracing features, such as anti-aliasing and
complex refractions- none of which are used in this presentation. (I didn't
want to wait days for the images to be calculated only to discover that I
made an error!)
Starting FLIby-
Simply unzip or copy all of the files into a directory on your hard disk,
enter the directory and type RUNME and press ENTER.
(A hard disk or ram disk is DEFINITELY recommended, if not required!)
If you have any comments, questions or suggestions (believe me I know I'll
improve!) I can be reached at:
John Rex
The County Morgue BBS
Chelmsford, MA
(508)250-8098
Don't worry about bothering me on the BBS... if you're interested in making
some ray-traced movies of your own, I would be more than happy to explain
how I made FLIby.