scottmanley

Sometimes things don't work out as planned (Patreon)

Published:

2020-01-01 18:55:37

Imported:

2026-06

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Content

I'm trying to depict the location of every satellite relative to the space station, but I was stuck with the problem of wanting the Earth to look decent, so I used the only scriptable rendering environment I knew - POVRay - and used that to make 360 renders of the Earth from LEO.

Boy it was slow..... so I turned the planet from an isosphere with actual terrain into a bump map and things got a lot faster.

Now it only took a week to render one orbit, my poor laptop was locked in a corner with its fan running full blast.

And it turned out wrong, I think my math for satellite positions isn't working correctly.

The good news is the slowest part is the planet rendering and I kept those frames separate before drawing the satellites all over it, as such I'm going to reuse those frames and see if I can make it work.

Files

Previews only

Satellites As Seen From ISS (Simulation)

360 video showing the location of all satellites as seen from an observer on the ISS. The code I'm using is only accurate to 1 second so this is a timelapse showing one orbit. I'm not sure where to go with this right now, the planet rendering took way too much time because I coded it up in POVRay, so the one orbit sequence took about a week of CPU time. I need to come up with a scriptable graphical environment that I can call from code.