It is actually very hard to fake the 1/6th gravity. To win an internet argument, I actually did a frame-by-frame time analysis of several objects falling in lunar gravity. The results were consistent with 1/6th earth gravity.
You can't just slow down the film by a factor of 6 either. First, then horizontal motions are too slow. You would have to do everything 6x faster horizontally. Secondly, this would not work anyway. distance = 1/2 x accel x time^2. Since it is a t^2 relationship, a linear rescaling of t (i.e. slowing the film) would not work. It could be easily detected by comparing objects falling from different heights.
On a computer, however . . .
Rand Simberg wrote:
I'm finding the link doesn't work for me.
It does if you add www and . at the beginning.
What browser are you using? Works fine for me with Firefox 3.
Frank Glover wrote:
"On a computer, however . . ."
Yeah. Convincing air or water turbulence takes quite a bit of computing effort to do. If you can have all your 'dust' particles just behave ballistically (as they would on the Moon), doing them in CGI would probably be pretty straightforward...
The turbulent dust beneath the landing Lunar shuttle in '2001' is one of its few flaws.
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About this Entry
This page contains a single entry by Rand Simberg published on July 7, 2008 8:41 AM.
I'm finding the link doesn't work for me.
It does if you add www and . at the beginning.
It is actually very hard to fake the 1/6th gravity. To win an internet argument, I actually did a frame-by-frame time analysis of several objects falling in lunar gravity. The results were consistent with 1/6th earth gravity.
You can't just slow down the film by a factor of 6 either. First, then horizontal motions are too slow. You would have to do everything 6x faster horizontally. Secondly, this would not work anyway. distance = 1/2 x accel x time^2. Since it is a t^2 relationship, a linear rescaling of t (i.e. slowing the film) would not work. It could be easily detected by comparing objects falling from different heights.
On a computer, however . . .
I'm finding the link doesn't work for me.
It does if you add www and . at the beginning.
What browser are you using? Works fine for me with Firefox 3.
"On a computer, however . . ."
Yeah. Convincing air or water turbulence takes quite a bit of computing effort to do. If you can have all your 'dust' particles just behave ballistically (as they would on the Moon), doing them in CGI would probably be pretty straightforward...
The turbulent dust beneath the landing Lunar shuttle in '2001' is one of its few flaws.