Dear all.
This my first post on this platform. I should have joined a while ago!
I wanted to share this still from an animation I created of a type of space station called a Stanford Torus. It was proposed in 1975 by NASA scientists at Stanford University, and my design is based closely on the original proposal.
The diameter of the overall station is 1.8 km. The interior diameter of the living section is 130 m. The ring section spins once per minute to provide 1g of gravity. Light enters the interior via a series of mirrors. First, a main mirror - always facing the Sun at an angle of 45 degrees - reflects light down to the central hub. This is in turn surrounded by a ring of mirrors, also at 45 degrees, which then direct that light through the glass roof and ‘down’ to the surface. So the light is always directly from above. These latter mirrors can be modulated to turn the lighting on and off, simulating a diurnal cycle.
I had great fun making this in Blender. It took about 9 to 10 weeks to model, and 48 hours to render the 2160 frames on an RTX3090 and an RTX3080ti, with one card in each of two machines.
You can see the actual animation, along with five other clips, in this YouTube video I recently posted.
Any other questions, please ask!
Thanks for reading.
