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MAKING A MOVING SOLAR SYSTEM USING TEXTURE MAPS AND PARENTING IN CINEMA 4D
March 15, 2014

I wrote this tutorial for the Peel Animation Festival, a science animation outreach program for high school students (you can see more evidence of how much fun this event was here). In this lesson, we will look at how to use texture maps, parenting, and keyframes to transform primitive spheres into an animated solar system. These are all fundamental basics in 3D animation. Here is an example of what you can make by following the tutorial. You can make it as complex as you want using the same principles - add more planets, or moons orbiting those planets.

The 3D texture maps I used can be found on the NASA website (the Sun is listed separately, here) or at Planet Emporium.