Meteorites

Probably the only one article I am going to write about animation programming.

The animation has to describe a fall of meteorites on the Earth, thus the environment is composed with a ground and a skybox. The meteorites are constituted by a ball for the shape and a smoking tail (particles); Thus, I have done a particle system, also used by the impact when the meteorite crashes on the ground. Finally, the camera is animated to be able to take advantage of the animation.

Under the hood:

• PointSprite Particle System (impact)
• Billboard Particle System (smoke)
• KeyFrames (vector and Bezier)
• Animated Camera
• Read the scene from XML
• Skybox
• Textured terrain and meteorite
• C++
• Visual Studio 2008

YouTube Video – Meteorites Demo