May You Make Your Movie – May 7, 2021 – Fiery Planet

Yesterday I set a monkey on fire, today I set a planet on fire.

Fiery Planet made in Motion.

I am at risk of making this month some sort of Motion marathon as there are a lot of very useful tutorials out there. However, this video was made as a complement to the video I tried to make in Blender yesterday. Since this scene required flames I thought I’d have a go. The tutorial I followed for this one (another one by Simon Ubsdell, in two parts, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC3R2yoRGzM), created the flames using some graphic manipulation instead of a particle effect. It might not be as realistic but I think you’d be hard-pressed to say it doesn’t look good.

Anyway, this project was a bit longer in that it required multiple piece created separately and then combined for the final output. Here’s a look at the folder I created for this projec:

Fiery planet folder.

You’ll see that there are several Motion projects:

Clouds was a duplicate project but it created the texture of the planet itself. (The renamed project is Planet Textures.)

Clouds project, renamed to Planet Textures.

The fiery planet itself, which created the intricate motion design for the planet’s surface:

Fiery planet project.

The hotspots, which zip around the planet, though I’ll confess I can’t really distinguish them in the final export:

Hotspots project.

Then the Planet Build project put everything together, using the .MOV files exported from the other projects:

Planet Build project put everything together into a seamless whole.

And the Replicator Build project created the flares that you can see shoot out from the planet every now and then:

Replicator Build for the Flares.

Each one of those projects required a separate export which was then combined into a single project and exported as a whole. Simon also had another background he used but I never got around to making one so I left the planet as is.

I then added some camera animation by way of keyframes and adjusting the X, Y, Z points.

Overall, the difference between using Motion to create a short animation and Blender is vast. I can’t imagine creating something like this in Blender in as short of time as it took in Motion. Granted, the planet isn’t a monkey’s head and the flames don’t look as fluid, but I’m sure that can be done in other ways.

Full May You Make Your Movie playlist can be found below:


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