So I was playing around tonight in an attempt to come up with a scene in orbit around some fictional world. Given that I love taking things to their extreme I decided to use a UV sphere set at a diameter of 12,000Km to see if that would work. I set it’s distance to be 36000km which is the approximate distance for stable geosynchronous orbit.
(I hope some folks that have done space models are reading this)
The UV sphere disappeared altogether. I presume I hit some sort of limit.
How would the masters handle this model? What sort of scaling tricks do you use for this?
You can change the camera clip-start and clip-end distance in the camera context (when the camera is selected).
However, I don’t recommend doing literal distances when it comes to space scenes, doing it on an actual 1 to 1 scale would mean you would run into problems with decimal and Zbuffer precision, the best you can do is to be like most artists and model your scene on a smaller scale and give the illusion of massive distances (using high-res textures for the planet to give the impression of viewing from far away).
Other tricks involve making other models and shrinking them down a bit to give the impression that they’re very far away.
If you still need a large scale you will need to know things like how the numpad ‘del’ key will center the view onto the current selection (which is very handy for ensuring that the view stays focused on where you are working).
Well, I don’t claim to be a master, but I’d borrow from the techniques filmmakers would use. In most space films, scenes of astronomical scale objects and scenes in human scale are created separately, and spliced together as needed. Further, objects of astronomical scale may be treated differently depending upon the point of view. Views from the orbiting object may be treated as a different scene that views from the object being orbited, and there might be yet another scene for the situation where the point of view is from neither the orbiting, nor the orbited object.
And note, too, that even at the relatively close (in astronomical terms) distance of 36,000 km, objects must be of astronomical scale in order to be seen without assistance. I’m not entirely certain of the size that an object in orbit 36,000 km above a surface would need to be in order to be visible to an unaided viewer, but I expect that it would need to be tens or hundreds of km in diameter.