Pre-Production & Production Update

 I have been making great progress with this project to the extent of completing the renders for the video sources. 

Since the last update, I have been working on the pre-production documents required such as Proposals, Installation plans, notes on technologies and equipment needed, sound plans, production schedules and shot lists. As well as the pre-production, I have been working on creating the sources needed for the project in Blender and After Effects. 

To begin the production stage, I started with creating test renders of other planets and using a variety of textures and normal/bump textures to make the models more realistic. The textures used in this project is supplied from Solar System Scope which has selection of textures available to download and use for free and without any sort of attributions required. The textures are distributed under Attribution 4.0 International license. https://www.solarsystemscope.com/textures/

After this test, I began to work on Pluto and Saturn over the next few days and went through many different iterations of render settings, backgrounds and environment changes.

There was some problems with figuring out what should be animated and how to implement a background, all with rendering a complete image within a reasonable render time. 

Which is where I came up with the idea of rendering the planet into a transparent image, render the star background and composite them all into one image and apply effects to the layers to then render the final composite.

These are the final results

The stars background is based on a sky texture but with no glowing effects, to achieve this I used an animated noise texture as a luma difference map which will look like a random black and white image that can be used to differentiate between what glows and what will not glow. The black parts of the texture will make the stars not glow while the white parts of the texture will make the stars glow. I then linked the glow effect to that noise texture to achieve a procedural twinkle effect of the stars without having to manually key frame glowing attributions to each star.

I then thought of the idea of using the piano strokes in the background to influence the intensity of the lens flare and glow of all three video sources. To achieve this, I would open the After Effects project that has all the sources composited and convert the audio into key frames. The way this works is that the volume of the audio file will increase the values of the keyframe. 

While planning i wanted to make the planets spin while playback but due to the way the texture of pluto was incomplete and might diminish the quality of the video source so instead of making the video sources seem static, I decided to make the lens flare move slightly as well as pulse. To achieve the movement, I decided to use keyframe expressions to implement random movement so I wouldn't have to animate them manually. The expression i used was "wiggle(.1,10)"