Around the Sun with Blender

So one of my favourite things about science are the opportunities when I get to do something sci comm related. I also have a passion for designing and drawing and I have painted as a hobby for 19 years. This has led me to my newest obsession: Blender.

I have previously made one VR visualisation with Blender using existing mesh data from a simulation and python scripting. So one evening in early April my brain went, hey what if I made a 3D visualisation of LISA and its orbits? In all fairness, a visualisation like this already exists! But I wanted to try my luck at creating something similar.

Step 1: Write down the orbits
After pondering how to get the trajectories right without having to calculate anything analytically, I thankfully found this convenient Wolfram demonstration by Oliver Jennrich with the approximate orbits! To test out the dynamics I wrote a simple python script, at which point the result looked like this:

 

Step 2: Open Blender
Like I said, I had used Blender once before and my skills were very limited but I did know how the python scripting interface worked. The first step was to just get the shapes of the objects there to see if everything looked and moved like it should in 3D.

 

Step 3: Add some materials so your video is not full of sad little grey blobs
For this I consulted numerous tutorials found online, such as how to create procedural starfield patterns, how to make the Sun actually look somewhat realistic and procedural planets. You can barely see the details of Earth but they are there, I promise. After the first go at creating the necessary materials the video looked like this:

The Sun is a bit too bright, Earth is very cartoonish and the space is a bit dull.

Step 4: Tweak all the things you don’t like
After some feedback from others it was suggested that some gravitational waves (GWs) could be added in. It took me approximately 1.5h to figure out what was the best way to generate some waves. The GW effect is created by a plane that has the wireframe and wave modifiers attached to it. The lasers of LISA were changed to red and Earth got some more detailed texture to it. Just before I rendered the final version I added a slight emission effect to the edges of the Earth to make it more visible.

Step 5: Render
Wait 3 hours for your poor laptop to struggle through generating 360 frames, so that you get a 15s video with frame rate of 24. FFMPEG the frames into a video and you are finished!

Now if only they added the possibility of doing 360 renders on Eevee (a render engine) so one could make a VR version out of this..

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