Thanks! Tbh., I myself am really in awe of what real visual artists can do with animation and creating new visuals so I don't consider this to be really competing with that on any level. But like I said, limits do sometimes deliver happy accidents and you try to paint pictures with what you have. As with the music I do, I know what I want once I see or hear it.
For example - this will accompany the track Earth Evolved, which is supposed to start out with the earth in pre-primeordial times, just when the basic building blocks of life start to form. So I knew I wanted to have something that would represent Earth in those times, just after being formed and hit by asteroids and comets, still in the process of cooling down and forming a basic atmosphere. I also knew I wanted to approach the planet (which necessitated having the possibility of animation). Anyway, since I wasn't to familiar with the program I also wanted to do this VERY simple, so I had to keep it all simple. What you see is basically a sphere with a texture mapped to it that came with the program and that suited what I wanted. I then wanted to have a little more detail and movement, so I put another sphere around it, and mapped to that a translucent cloud texture which was also in the program. I animated that sphere to turn slightly while the actual 'earth' remains still. Finally, I animated both spheres to fly towards the camera.
I do like the animation system which allows you to pose different objects at a point in time and then keyframe them. The animation system will interpolate objects between keypoints so in this case I just had to use two keyframes, one for the start position and one for the end position. The cloud rotation is also animated with keyframes.
I'm still working out how to animate the textures themselves as I'd like to have the lava moving and boiling a bit, but at the moment it's baby steps. And to be honest, working stuff out often results in happy accidents that I can pass off as creative decisions!
The end result will be much cooler though, with a pic by NASA JPL as a starry background and stuff. Stay tuned!
