Lesson 5: Modeling Space and Animating the Flight of the Spaceship

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Overview

In this lesson, we will create a portion of near-Earth space and animate the flight of the spaceship.

Having completed the previous lessons on modeling, material creation and assignment, and animation, these tasks should not be difficult for you. Therefore, from this lesson on, we will dwell less on basic operations.

Before we proceed, we need to get some figures from an encyclopedia. The diameter of the Earth is about 13,000 kilometers, one of the Moon about 3,500 kilometers, and of the Sun about 1.4 million kilometers. The distance from the Earth to the Moon is about 384,000 kilometers, and from the Earth to the Sun about 150 million kilometers. We quote these figures to demonstrate the grandeur of our task and the impossibility of creating these objects and distances life-size. The spaceship itself does not exceed 30 meters. 3ds max does not work with scales differing by more than 10 orders of magnitude, which, in any case, is not needed.

Much of this lesson (and of subsequent lessons) may seem strange and illogical from the point of view of what you learned at college or university. But everything falls into place when you realize that all of this is nothing but a simulation, and all means are justified for the sake of the result.

Finally, in many respects, the sequence of operations corresponds to that of professionals when they work alone. We wrote this book primarily for those who want to work freelance, for jacks-of-all-trades. In a corporate structure, however, your work may proceed in a different order.

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