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Planets/Gravity Simulation?


rusty

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Hi,

 

Clearly A:M was not designed for anything like this but I was trying to think of some way to place multiple spheres and simulate each one attracting every other one--like planets and gravity, the gravity (attraction) having a fall off. Hell I can't even think of a way to have one object pull on another object!

 

Any thoughts?

 

Cheers,

Rusty

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Newton Physics maybe?

 

Hmm... maybe. I've never looked at the feature that much but assumed that the 'pull' on objects went with the scene's gravity setting. Can an objects be assigned gravity settings?

 

I'll have to look at it...as soon as Hash sends me another .lic file. I re-installed the OS on my laptop and when I tried to reinstall AM it said 'activation code already in use'. But it's only been about a week and I've only sent two email requests.

 

Rusty

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Newton Physics maybe?

 

Hmm... maybe. I've never looked at the feature that much but assumed that the 'pull' on objects went with the scene's gravity setting. Can an objects be assigned gravity settings?

 

I'll have to look at it...as soon as Hash sends me another .lic file. I re-installed the OS on my laptop and when I tried to reinstall AM it said 'activation code already in use'. But it's only been about a week and I've only sent two email requests.

 

Rusty

 

Depending on what you aim to do you could use transparent cloth-materials to do that:

Think of a elastic strap between two spheres which is totally transparent.

 

Other than that I think it is not possible to simulate something like that in A:M. You could do that with particles and forces, but with real object I dont think it is possible.

 

See you

*Fuchur*

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I remember having an application that was given to me by a guy who worked for NASA, but that was back in the System 6/7 days of the Macintosh. It was just a tiny little app that allowed you to plug in info and run a simulation. Surely there are much more advanced ones available now. I think it was just called "gravity" or something like that.

 

The only real "hard" sci-fi idea I ever had was for a story called "The Infinity Orbit." It was essentially about what would happen to a planet in a binary star system if it reached a point where its orbit swapped to the second star, making a figure eight orbit. This guy's kids had actually come up with a simulation where that would happen, but I was more curious about what would happen to the planet itself. Could it survive such a transition or would it break up? Or would the conflict cause it to just shoot out of both orbits? I never felt like I knew enough to say for sure what would happen and I hated the idea of ending the story with it never being decided.

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Is this just for the sake of doing it or are you trying to animate something? What actual result are you trying to achieve? You have your choice of paths (deformable), springs, bones and forces!

 

Hard to explain...put simply I want to fool around and see if under certain circumstances small areas would seem to expand as gravity from the whole affected the local effects of gravity and also mixed in with this the effects on a void and on groups of voids. It was an idea I had for explaining dark energy.

 

Thanks!

Rusty

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Is this just for the sake of doing it or are you trying to animate something? What actual result are you trying to achieve? You have your choice of paths (deformable), springs, bones and forces!

 

Hard to explain...put simply I want to fool around and see if under certain circumstances small areas would seem to expand as gravity from the whole affected the local effects of gravity and also mixed in with this the effects on a void and on groups of voids. It was an idea I had for explaining dark energy.

 

Thanks!

Rusty

 

http://www.orbitsimulator.com/gravity/articles/what.html

 

http://gravit.slowchop.com/

 

http://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulation/gravity-and-orbits

 

http://www.uranisoft.com/gravity/

 

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fil...avity-simulator

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Ummm no, I would not rely on any animation software to do that type of analysis/modelling. Mathematica (wolfram.com) is a good math/science modelling tool that can also provide animated output.

 

Cheers

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Where A:M can work really well in this is where you've already got the visual in mind and you then recreate it in A:M.

Using one of the other programs suggested to get that visual locked down would be ideal because once known (and shared) it'll be easier to see how to simulate the same look and feel in A:M.

 

As you are working backward from a theory this should be fairly straightforward to show manually in A:M.

You simply animate the objects to correspond with the movement of the theory.

As David has suggested, analyzing (or verifying) that theory is likely outside the scope of A:M.

To say much more about the approach, we'd have to know more concerning the theory.

 

Without knowing more I'd say you could set up spheres of influence (as has been suggested... models set with transparency of 100%) and use Newton Dynamics, Cloth simulation and any number of other features found in A:M.

 

A:M is a theory-agnostic animation program.

It will automatically validate anything you create.

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newton seems to work for this. i constrained forces to the spheres, the one in the middle with a negative magnitude, the others with a positive. but if you want to achieve relatively accurate results to demonstrate something it will get very very exhausting tinkering with the settings.

magneticspheres_low.mov

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Sebastian,

 

I'm not sure what Rusty's goal is here but I like the direction you are headed.

 

I'd love to see your current effort done with Lights (instead of mesh spheres).

Specifically, with 2 negative lights and 1 positive.

A backdrop/patch would likely have to be placed behind the lights to properly see the effect.

Rationale: The lights themselves can exert an influence upon each other that plain-jane spheres cannot.

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heres another one with no ground model and gravity set to zero... btw, the middle force and the middle sphere are not constrained to another, so the that sphere can float around within the negative force. i did not know newton objects work with forces, this is kinda fun!

 

Sebastian,

 

I'm not sure what Rusty's goal is here but I like the direction you are headed.

 

I'd love to see your current effort done with Lights (instead of mesh spheres).

Specifically, with 2 negative lights and 1 positive.

A backdrop/patch would likely have to be placed behind the lights to properly see the effect.

Rationale: The lights themselves can exert an influence upon each other that plain-jane spheres cannot.

 

i´m afraid i don´t quite understand :blink:

magneticspheres_0gravity.mov

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actually, i have

 

negative lights for shadows

 

Yes, indeed. Nice explanation and examples. :)

 

The primary place I use negative lights is in a shot that is lit well but needs an angle or approach to the subject to be slightly darker.

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Hot damn!! I must return to this thread!! Stuff's been happening here. I'm been buried in gunk....but its good gunk. Redoing my notebook (reinstalling the OS and all the applications--it's running so nice now)...readying the next release of my book (with corrections, links and an excerpt from book 2)...creating press releases...working on book 2...working on the trailer for book 2...and getting so stressed out that I freeze up and wind up doing absolutely nothing.

 

But this thread's little effort is important for book 2.

 

Right now however, my wife wants me to do her so....

 

until whenever!

 

Whoops, false alarm. :-(

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • *A:M User*

I don't know how or even if you could integrate this with AM, but if you're just interested in playing around with planetary simulations and doing stuff like smacking asteroids into Earth or sending a rogue blackhole through the solar system, this might be something you want to check out:

 

http://store.steampowered.com/app/72200/

 

Normal price is like $10, I think it is on sale now for $4 or so.

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  • 4 weeks later...
I remember having an application that was given to me by a guy who worked for NASA, but that was back in the System 6/7 days of the Macintosh. It was just a tiny little app that allowed you to plug in info and run a simulation. Surely there are much more advanced ones available now. I think it was just called "gravity" or something like that.

 

The only real "hard" sci-fi idea I ever had was for a story called "The Infinity Orbit." It was essentially about what would happen to a planet in a binary star system if it reached a point where its orbit swapped to the second star, making a figure eight orbit. This guy's kids had actually come up with a simulation where that would happen, but I was more curious about what would happen to the planet itself. Could it survive such a transition or would it break up? Or would the conflict cause it to just shoot out of both orbits? I never felt like I knew enough to say for sure what would happen and I hated the idea of ending the story with it never being decided.

 

 

Here it is on an old abandonware Mac site. Try it with a current emulator.

http://macintoshgarden.org/games/gravitation-ltd-50

 

I remember the older B/W version on my Mac Plus... good stuff.

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Hi,

 

Clearly A:M was not designed for anything like this but I was trying to think of some way to place multiple spheres and simulate each one attracting every other one--like planets and gravity, the gravity (attraction) having a fall off. Hell I can't even think of a way to have one object pull on another object!

 

Any thoughts?

 

Cheers,

Rusty

 

I would thing that expressions could be used to implement equations from Isaac Newton's laws of gravity.

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