Spiral Galaxy

Thanks, 3Point. Always a pleasure to see you again.
Yes, TomWalks is THE man. I’ve learned so much lately just studying his tutorials and vids that it’s already changing the way I look at Blender and rendering forever.

As a side note, if you like my galaxy, this could be the last chance to see it. I no longer have a copy on my computer (I know, I’m supposed to save all my rendered videos for the future…) and, because of a recent YouTube flamewar with a self-appointed guardian of YouTube community guidelines, I might lose my account. Along with every video I’ve ever posted. So, enjoy while you can…
As another sidenote, I’m putting much greater emphasis in the future on my VIMEO account. I’ve noticed a lot of the Blender Artists I really respect choose Vimeo as their home owing to Vimeo’s emphasis on content and art over dramah. I should have seen the wisdom in that long ago.
So, I hope you’ll all find me on my new Vimeo home at…

Sadly, I haven’t put any work into my Vimeo channel in months. Actually, the only vid I’ve posted there was my FIRST Cycles test render. So, clean slate, and a powerful desire to fill it with new work that’s a big improvement over anything I’ve done up to now. :smiley:
Necessity IS the mother of invention…

Oooh. Maybe I should dl and move stuff too. I haven’t kept copies either. Sad to hear of your probs.

Well, yeah. It’s always good to have backup copies. Wish I did that more often.
But, yeah, I’m really impressed with Vimeo. It’s much more like a small art theatre than YouTube. And YouTube is sort of like a sports stadium filled with really drunk people most of the time. The trouble is when those drunks then feel like no one has the right to speak except them…
Anyway, Vimeo is much more serious. I’ve been watching a lot of Vimeo today. There’s some really gorgeous short films there.

I have found Vimeo playback to be buggy and slow in the past (hamstrung Amazon servers?) but may have to revisit.

I think I used to have the same problem a while back, which I think is why I decided back then that YouTube was superior.
But I think things have changed on Vimeo since then. If you have HD selected for playback option, it really is gorgeous. And it doesn’t take a long time to load a vid anymore. About the same as YouTube on HD. Maybe a little faster.
But it’s simplified.
The difference is in the audience and attitude. Vimeo has always made it a point that it’s a “respectful” site. So the emphasis is on the filmmaker and film. Not trolls and dramah and “videos” of people sitting in front of a camera babbling about their dramah, subscribers, and trolling. It’s sort of the difference between a day at a museum and a day at the coliseum.

Vimeo has some issues I don’t like. You have to pay to get HD embedding. You have to pay to not wait 30 minutes+ for your video to be “processed”, a bogus and ridiculous gimmick. If you start paying, you keep paying. When I signed on, there was no indication it was a recurring expense, and I discovered I was paying 10 bucks a month for nearly 8 months. >=\ When I tried to cancel, I couldn’t find the cancel feature on the page. The only option was deleting my account and all the videos contained therein altogether. So I contacted them, and the friendly and courteous rep courteously informed me I was stupid and provided a link to an opt-out page not particularly accessible in any logical manner from the main Vimeo site. Thusly, I was out nearly $100 and I hadn’t uploaded a video in months. Me: >=(.

I also find Vimeo’s “we don’t do porn” policy amusing, considering my Activity bar is virtually a no-no to click on, as naked people in various erotic poses (but that’s not porn!!) dance across the screen.

Oh well. =) Vimeo’s community, on the other hand, is MUCH better, smarter and pretty well-behaved. =)

Dan

@Dan: Yeah, I would be pretty : >=( too!
THANK YOU FOR THE INSIGHT!
I had no idea they were that screwed up.

But I do agree with you about the community. It is very grown up and respectful.
And I, personally, like the lack of a crackdown on the free speech rights of uploaders as far as content goes. Yes, there really is a lot of nudity and vanillia porn on there. But that makes me glad. I’d much rather see too many naked people and art that pushes the line into something that could conceivably make some uncomfortable (even I was left blushing at at least one of those vids…) than be left in a world where the most repressed blue-hair is King. We already have every other element of Orwell’s “1984” firmly and legally in place in our society except for active “thought police” (and I’ve even recently run into a case of THAT, which is why I’m looking for somewhere other than YouTube to go in the first place…)

Still, Vimeo is MUCH smaller than YouTube. It’s really a whole different league entirely, if not a whole 'nother ballgame.

Their gimmicky rules you pointed out (no HD embedding, endlessly paying, the 30-minute processing rule, one upload a week rule, etc are pretty silly, even outright opportunism.
However, the fact that it’s a serious place that seems to gravitate more toward artistic liberty (Why do I feel I’m about to see that phrase in quotes along with an argument from someone…?) than YouTube is commendable, especially these days, and I think can at least earn Vimeo credit as an “underground” haven for the more experimental…
Or, at least, a decent backup plan for any animator who is always feeling they run the risk of being forcibly exiled from YouTube.

Oops. It wasn’t my intention to spark a debate on the ethics of free speech and the First Amendment. Sorry if I offended you, though! I’m here to critique art! =D Politics is for other places/people. I’m an artist and wanna make spaceships!

As far as your galaxy goes, it’s quite nice. I didn’t know about that tutorial you posted. I agree about TomWalks. But what about the size of the stars? Obviously, they’re a tad too big still, but how CAN you calculate the locations and physics of 100 billion individual points without crashing a PC into the dirt? =\ Hmm…

Well, I guess we’ll always be subject to the inevitable drag of Moore’s Law so long as we’re still stuck with present computer concept. =)

Dan

LOL! That’s rich.
You’ve never offended me, Dan. Nor could I imagine you being capable of such a thing. Quite the opposite. I don’t think I’ve run across a nicer person on the internet.
(Actually, if I ever had a single serious piece of constructive criticism for your work, it would simply be: Attempt to be more offensive. :P)
In fact, I was worried that you might have got the wrong idea with my last post, and that I might have offended you. I hope I didn’t. (I was actually referring to a notorious little denizen of YouTube that sprouted up recently to selectively report anyone in the comments sections of The Young Turks videos that he could construe as having “violated community guidelines” in any way with their comments, then giving random YouTubers ultimata about their comments. As you can imagine, it made him unpopular pretty quick… Nothing worse than a dyed-in-the-wool Blue Haired Thought Policeman on Youtube…)

Yeah. 100 billion stars. My galaxy doesn’t even crack a million stars.
The size of my stars was actually a messy point in that render.
While I was playing with the parameters, trying to find the happy medium between all my stars getting sucked down the black hole, and all of them flying off into intergalactic space, I came to the conclusion that something closer to reality would be to hit the “Multiply Mass By Size” button. This helped the simulation (I THINK) in terms of realism.
But, not having seen the whole thing as animation at that point, I left the stars at 1 for size. Going lower meant that they started doing crazy things. And, since the stars were emitted as a group, randomly as individuals, and since there was a little bit of random on the size of the emitted stars picked slightly randomly from the group, things got a little… random.
Point is, yes you’re right. There are some that are a little big, relatively speaking.
So, next time I make a galaxy, I’ll keep that in mind.
Thank you for keeping up with the thread.

(I’m still scratching my head how someone so nice could think that they had offended anyone… The interwebs are a strange and mysterious place, Dr. House…)

for realism try making the spiral less compact with better spaced arms, add some dust clouds and some globular clusters in elliptical orbits. otherwise very good, i could never have achieved this effect!

What about dark matter halo around galaxy keeping form in shape, another ring of fields?

Thank you, Jagdpanther, and for watching and the comment.
Yeah, most of the work and hairpulling in this went into trying to get the arms to spread out more. I experimented a long time, weeks actually. This was about as good as I could get, and even this I just let sit on my desktop for another couple of weeks, feeling that I had failed and wasted a lot of time fruitlessly.
The smoke sim was there to try to give the impression of dust.
But the spread arms… I just threw my hands up in frustration in frustration at one point, as I said earlier in this thread.
Interestingly, I never thought of the solution TomWalks detailed in his tutorial which I posted earlier, that of weight-painting a ring, and having it emit particles in different weights, thus producing arms. I think that would have worked better. As you can imagine, I pretty much slapped myself as soon as I saw his tutorial with his solutions. TomWalks is a genius, as far as I’m concerned.

@3point: not a bad idea. However, that will have to be in the “Spiral Galaxy: Special Edition,” coming in 2020, in which I’ll replace a lot of the footage in this video with MUCH more elaborate particle systems and smoke sims, including dark matter simulations. I also intend to have a CGI Jabba, WHICH I HAD INTENDED TO HAVE IN THIS VIDEO, but we simply ran out of time and money…

I’m sure you’ll all be as happy as me to note that THIS video will no longer be available for viewing when the “Special Edition” comes out, SO WATCH THIS ONE WHILE YOU STILL CAN!!!

Disney WILL sell me an original edition blue ray

Not unless a crack team of lawyers doesn’t send out a “Cease and Desist” Order…

Looking at the original animation/still the gas seems to clip early instead of fading out. Is that an YT encoding aretfact or is it intentional? Seems a bit blobby.

Sorry if you addresed that already.

Probably mostly my fault. This was done in BI. So, every time I wanted to see the effect of some tweak on the smoke sim’s look, I had to wait for an f12 render. Which was taking a long time on my old machine. And it was single frames. I think I was trying to make it so that you could just barely see the smoke. At one point, I was even going to delete the smoke sim entirely…
I don’t remember how many times I rendered animation for this thing, but it wasn’t many. In fact, this whole thing may have been the first animation render I did.
As I said, I wasn’t happy with it when I watched it. I believe I did an animation test, didn’t like it, and let it sit on my desktop for a few weeks. Then, on the verge of just deleting it forever while cleaning my desktop one day, I watched it, said “Who knows, maybe with a little editing…”
I cut it up, moved a few things around, and said, “Well, I can go back to working on it and make it ‘perfect,’ or I can post it like this. I worked on it for weeks and it’s like this. It’s just a smoke sim experiment, not something for a larger project, and frankly I’m sick of looking at it…”

Actually, I was just thinking about that. I think that’s exactly the right approach, at least to simulate the way we THINK dark matter works. You’d make a ring of Force Fields around the edge of the galaxy, all set to some negative number in strength so that they attract. It would take a lot of Force Fields, more or less evenly distributed along the ring.
I’m in the middle of several other projects right now, so I don’t really have the time to get into it.
3Point, if you’d like to build a model like this and test it, I’d love to see the effect of such a Dark Matter Ring on the galaxy model. Who knows, it might actually produce a galaxy that looks more realistic, with spreading arms and everything, without having to resort to TomWalk’s solution of a emitting ring with weight-painted emission. I bet he’d LOVE to see it too.
If you make it, I hope you’ll post a copy on this thread…

Put brain in gear and have a look at this :wink:

Yeah, thanks 3point. I subbed that guy. It was a fun one.
I do completely suck at math. But I’ve watched so many cosmology and astrophysics vids that I get it anyway.
We are familiar with 4% of the universe. The other 96% we understand as well as gods or angels dancing on the head of a pin. Fairie dust.
My favorite part was when he said that one of the theories of Dark Matter is that it’s the gravitational effect of the shadow of gravity from parallel universes being felt on our own universe. I LOVE that!
I bet you could simulate that using multiple scenes, composited together in a render…

Here you go, 3Point. Put this in your head and scratch it.
I’ve always been skeptical about the existence of Dark Matter. Personally, I think that there are elements of the effects of gravity on the multiverse scale that we don’t really understand yet. So, I’ve always had to restrain myself from referring to people’s need to resort to Dark Matter as something akin to “fairy dust,” or something similar.
I don’t think this vid is proof that Dark Matter doesn’t exist.
But still…