Animations
This page really needs to be updated. At the moment it contains historical stuff only. The renderings/animations I'm creating now are of much higher quality as becomes obvious when the stills below are compared to more recent renderings elsewhere at this site.
Rendering stills is only half the fun - this 3D stuff becomes much more "alive" in animations. I especially like big animations with 1000 or more frames with a frame size of at least 400x300, preferably 640x480 (the common 320x240 is awful !). Needless to say this requires a lot of disk space to store the individual frames while making the animation although it should be noted that I store the temporary frames in a compressed directory - this is very efficient (70-90% saving of disk space) since these 3D frames usually compress very well.
Below are some sample renderings from one of my animations. This is mainly here for historical reason. I created this back in 1997 but today (2001) I think it's awfully primitive, I now have far better maps of Jupiter and the Galileans than I had in 1997 and greatly improved rendering software.
Galileo's C9 orbit around Jupiter
Below are some stills from a 2000+ frame animation I created in 1997 showing the view from the Galileo spacecraft during its ninth orbit (the so called C9 orbit) around Jupiter. This orbit included a very close flyby of the satellite Callisto and a more distant one of Ganymede. It should be noted that these stills and the animation were created using an old version of my renderer and with lower quality planetary maps than I have now. I did a much better version of this animation recently. Still I think this one compares favourbly to most of the animations at e.g. the Galileo homepage, they are obviously "quick" versions and not of very high quality (they are of much lower quality than the NASA animations sometimes shown on TV).
Since I do not have space here for big stuff like this the animation is available at the Space Movie Archive homepage under the name Complete C9 Callisto encounter and Jupiter flyby. This archive is a big collection of astronomy and space animations but unfortunately it no longer seems to be maintained. This is regrettable - there is quite a lot of wonderful stuff there although some of it is starting to get outdated. You can get my animation (in AVI format) directly from this same site by clicking here and the associated readme file here. Warning: The animation is rather big, more than 6 MB g-zipped. It is approximately 2000 frames of 400x300 pixels (the common 320x240 or something like that is too small for my taste :-).
Other stuff
I have recently created several better animations than the one described above but it was the first big one I did so in a sense it is a historic one. The new animations include Galileo's G7 orbit, a Neptune rotation movie and Saturn and Earth/Moon flybys.