Project 1: Solar System
Sophia Morakis, 2/17/22
This is part 1 of the project, following the Maya tutorial.
This is part 2 of the project, with the changes I made.
Change 1: I made the planets look more realistic by changing their surfaces to actual pictures of the planets' surfaces. I found images from this site: https://www.solarsystemscope.com/textures/
Change 2 : I made the planets' orbits look more realistic by staggering where they began, and slowing down the orbit of the outer planets.
Change 3: For this change, I wanted to add an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, based on the Quantum Asteroid Field in Guardians of the Galaxy 2. In this asteroid field, the rocks appeared and disappeared at random.
To make the asteroid belt, I followed some tutorials and also used a lot of trial and error. I first made two realistic-looking rocks by creating spheres, denting the surfaces with the Soft Select tool, and mapping a rocky texture onto the objects.
Then I created a torus that would emit particles within the torus's volume and kill the particles when they exited the volume. I changed the particles to appear as one of the two asteroids I had created. Then I added custom attributes to change the orientation and scale of the asteroids to make them look more random.
