Cigar-shaped??? UPDATE: I redid ‘Oumuamua as a spline object, roughening it up in the vertex modeler. Should have been my first choice. Now it looks less like something Rover left in the neighbor’s flower bed — and more like a squid or a Sukhoi 27 fighter. Progress?
MPEG video, 06:47, 45 MB:
As of March 2019, ‘Oumuamua has passed the orbit of Saturn on its way out of our solar system.
All we ever saw was a single light pixel on a dark field. Anything else on the Interlink was an artist’s conception. Astronomers are pretty sure ‘Oumuamua is cylindrical with an aspect ratio other than 1:1. They also posited that it would be dark red in color, both from spectrophotometry and the fact that its been blasted by cosmic radiation for untold millions of years. Lastly, they detected that the body was rotating around multiple axes, though more smoothly than in my depiction.
The nitty gritty: ‘Oumuamua started out in Carrara Pro 8.5 as a meta-ball object, but the result was disappointing. I switched to an asymmetrical spline object, converted it to a vertex object, and applied deformations and decimation to “roughen it up.” Still not perfect, but it looks closer to artists’ conceptions.
The background was created by panning a camera with “wide view” lens 360 degrees while recording a star field photo. That animation was saved as an AVI file, which then became the color/glow shader applied to a large sphere. The sphere in this animation is not spinninng. It simply provides a sense of curvature of space. The star motion is entirely due to the AVI video applied as a shader to the sphere.
Also, ‘Oumuamua is stationary in the scene, with keyframes added with crude alterations of Y- and Z- axis rotations.
It wasn’t going to be practical to generate a six-and-a-half-minute video to match the music. I had to loop the animation 30+ times. Sorry ’bout that.
I crafted the soundtrack last fall in Propellerhead Software Reason. You can refer back my post, Also Sprach ‘Oumuamua, for my inspiration.
Joseph Ervin Jr: Synthesizer Fan 