The Universe in 3D: Planet & Star Size Comparison

Artwork Works in Progress
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I’ve always found space to be amazing, so I started working on this project about 2 years ago when I had just started blender. I recently decided that I wanted to revise and redo this to make it as nice as possible.

It shows the insane difference of size between different planets and stars.

This is my 3rd version which I made a few months ago.

It was rendered and uploaded in 1080p, but there were a few encoding issues, so the video isn’t as crisp as I would like.

Tell me what you think about it. I’m planning on re-doing the planet rings and adding actual surface maps next. :slight_smile:

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it needs a lot of work but, when it comes to the actual video… holy cow! that is big…

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Here’s and image of the new planet image mapping and bump mapping so far.

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6027/6002945887_c6c861d3af_b.jpg
6002945887_c6c861d3af_b.jpg1024×576

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The bump mapping does wonders - well done!

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where did you get the maps?

NASA may be ?

nice work keep it up

happy 2.5

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Thanks. They are images taken by NASA that were then stitched together and modified (not by me) to fill in the gaps and correct some artifacting.

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I like this video, but ofcourse you have a lot to live up to as there are several really good videos out there that do conceptually the same thing.

Some critique:
If you scale earth to the size of a pingpong ball, a pingpong ball has a more irregular surface. Sticking a bump map onto earth kind of makes it look faker.

change the font. adjust the kerning between those letters that naturally need less/more space between them… like capital V and e.

8

cool, I did not realize saturn was so big, or that such massive stars existed.

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by the way there is ascript that can make the 3D model of several planets available
but can givve huge amount of data and slow !

happy 2.5

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Yeah, I’m going to work on expanding the video to cover galaxies, other stars, and up to estimated universe size. There are a good number of videos like this, that’s why I made mine different by excluding most of the stars. Whenever I watch a standard video like this, the difference in size from each star shown is not too drastic, so I find it quite hard to see just how immense the final star shown is. That is why I left a huge gap in mine, I think it gives a much greater feel as to how enormous the final star is. :slight_smile:

I understand what you are saying with bump map scaling. Realistically, you shouldn’t be able to see height changes at all on any of the planets, only slight crater shadowing and such. Yet, having a slight bump map is much more visually appealing to the average viewer. I’m going to try and find a good balance between realism and a neat visual appearance.

I am open to all ideas, what font would you suggest. The one I am currently using looks way too harsh. And you’re right, those V’s are so close together that they look almost like a W.

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Sounds like a cool script. I should test it out, do you have a link? :slight_smile:

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Yep subsurf would have been cool on the video. And wow wasn’t that a big ocean!? :wink:

That last star was awesome great work but I found the positioning of the smallest to largest a little disconcerting when really large objects were next to them. that is all the planets/stars bunch up to one side.

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wow, those bump maps do make a world of difference. as to zeffii’s comment regarding the earth looking fake, i think the point is more to provide a place holder to compare scale wise…

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Ok, so I’ve decided to redo this project by expanding the range of objects in this video.

Instead of ranging from Pluto to VV Cephei A, I will (attempt) to make the video range from the SMALLEST ATOM (Helium, 64 picometers) to the size of the OBSERVABLE UNIVERSE (93 billion Light Years). I have never seen a video of this magnitude done, nor have I heard of anybody attempting it, so this will probably be a bit difficult…

Note: I will just append my planets to the new .blend

I currently have a list of 71 objects, but I need more for it to scale nicely. If anybody has ideas for popular objects, mountains, structures, machines, celestial, etc to use, I would probably accept them happily.

If anybody wants to help with some simple models, such as Viruses, Humans, Vehicles, Aircraft, etc I would love the help. You will of course be credited. :slight_smile:

If anybody wants to help with texturing, that would also be greatly appreciated. Once again, you would be credited. :slight_smile:

I want the objects in the video to be somewhat realistic, but they obviously don’t need to even come close to comparing with the amazing things people have shared on this site. I only want somewhat simple models with somewhat simple textures, otherwise this thing might be rendering for a year.

So, all help would be GREATLY appreciated :smiley:

Now for some foreseen technical issues (feel free to tell me more that I may have forgotten):

I want to be able to make this video in one shot with one fluid camera movement, but this seems to be impossible. Since the ending object is 8,835,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times larger than the beginning object, blender is unable to handle it. Objects with extremely large dimensions seem to just disappear.

I’m starting with the a value of “1” for an objects dimension being 1 nm, since my smallest object is 1 pm (.001 nm) and blender can only input dimension values as low as 0.001. Also, since camera clipping can go as low as about .1 before glitching, I will just lower the camera clipping min to .001 for only about 100 frames, so that it can capture the 1 pm object without destroying the other objects. As the video progresses, I will just raise the camera clip min value. Also, I can extend the size of the largest available objects that I can use in one shot by increasing the camera clip min also, but there is a limit to this before it just fails to do anything.

Another problem is that I can’t even input a dimension that is too large, otherwise it just fills it with “1.#IO”

So, in summary, I will have to figure out a way to scale these objects in multiple different scenes which will require some additional math, but the main problem will be making a smooth transition between segments.

Oh well, I figure out something. :slight_smile:

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Check out


or

or

Traditionally they are the powers of ten zooms. But would be great to see your take.

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These are all excellent and very well done! I couldn’t fine any when I searched.

They are all in image format though, lets see if I can do this in full 3D :slight_smile:

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Just pondering the issue, I think that they could all exist in a single scene if you animate the cameras FOV. It would be extremly wide for wide shots (and dollied out) then zoomed really tight for small objects (as well as dollying in). Just a thought.

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That’s a good idea, but my current problem is that for whatever reason, larger objects need larger camera clip minimums to be seen without distorting and breaking to pieces even though the object is very far from the camera. For instance, if I have an plane with dimension of 10 and the camera clip minimum at 1, it will look fine, but if I extend the object’s dimensions to 10,000 or so, I need to extend the clip minimum to about 100 for it to be seen without immense distortion. But it will only distort really large objects. Eventually it reaches a point where I can’t extend the camera minimum far enough to keep every single object from distorting.

I don’t understand this glitch at all, the camera’s minimum clip isn’t even close to any object, yet the smaller ones will stay intact while the larger ones are destroyed.

EDIT: Here’s a picture of what it’s doing. Those are supposed to currently be one-tone objects, each face of the objects seems to forget if its actually supposed to be in view of the camera.

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6122/6010447143_60b54065cc_b.jpg
http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6122/6010447143_60b54065cc_b.jpg1024×576 46.3 KB

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You are sure there is no duplicated verts in there?

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it’s possible that your normals need recalculating… hmm… as for the scale issue, you’d probably have to do quite a few different clips and stitch them together…