Posted on September 2, 2014

Problem: Model the solar system and animate the planets and moons to revolve and rotate.

Solution: To complete the above mentioned exercise I used different primitives (not just spheres) as planets so their rotation about the axis is easy to make out. Each planet has at most 2 moon revolving around them. The animation is 600 frames long running at 30 fps.

I tried to make the rotation and revolution times proportionate to the actual times with the length of 600 frames representing 1 complete revolution of Mars. Thus, all other planets and moons rotate and revolve with respect to that period. As a result you will not see all the planets completing a full revolution.
The 20 seconds long clip can been seen below with a snapshot of the resultant hierarchical structure.