Constellation Animations

Welcome to the World of Lucy

High-Level Project Summary

The project our team developed is an animation, in which the satellite Lucy visits 8 different asteroids and gives facts about them. This challenge asked of us to show off the diversity of each astroid on Lucy’s route, to show off how important each of these ancient shards of rock are. Our animation shows how much information is stored within these chunks of ice and stone. Displaying their scientific names, asteroid type, location in the solar system, and other various facts, the significance of this journey and these asteroids is made clear.

Link to Project "Demo"

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1shovMviQHLKV9RH7-eu_1Nnj7pyqz5tg31gqeGP9xuA/edit

Link to Final Project

https://youtu.be/bEV0mSzwNWM

Detailed Project Description

Our project is a 3 dimensional animation. In order to make this work, we rendered patterns that fit to each of the planets and stars, and used Cinema4D to animate their orbits as well as Lucy’s path throughout the solar system. We then used Adobe AfterEffects to add in the asteroids as well as Lucy’s facts and statements about them. We did it this way in order to show the full scope of these celestial bodies, and how each of them compare to each other in their orbit and their placement in our universe. With this animation we hope to convey the importance of this mission and show how interesting it is.

Space Agency Data

We used several resources from the Space Apps program, primarily from NASA. Using the links provided by the “recourse” tab, almost all of the information in our project comes directly from nasa.gov. The images of Lucy’s trajectory and path through the universe inspired the idea for this animation, in which we get to see Lucy follow this course and learn about each of these asteroids that Lucy will study.

Hackathon Journey

Our Space Apps experience, across all the years this team has participated, has been so much fun. We’ve learned so much about coding, about animation, and about the universe that we live in. We chose this challenge because we felt that our skills in animation, research, and programming best fit this challenge in particular. We approached this challenge step by step, starting with the research, then the animating, then the rendering, and then the editing, and then finally the demo and this form. We had a problem where the internet went out mid render, and we had to restart the entire animation process. We had to scrap the asteroid animation entirely and add it in later with Adobe AfterEffects. As for thanks, I would first of all like to thank our team, especially our Animator. She spent so much time and energy on this project and I really appreciate her commitment and willingness to try so hard for this challenge. We’d also like to thank our parents, who drove us where we needed to go and gave us the time and support we needed to complete this project.