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Moon Phase Simulator in the Blender Game Engine

8
By on Video

Ron Proctor has created an interactive simulator in Blender to properly explain the phases of the moon.

Ron writes:

Here's an overview of a moon phase simulator I made with the BGE for grad school. The simulator is intended to address a common misconception about the phases of the Moon by showing the system to scale in distance and size.

Lots of people think that the phases of the Moon are caused by Earth's shadow, but this is not the case; shadow alignments are actually quite rare due to the inclination of the Moon's orbital plane. The misconception is driven by common graphical representations of the system, where the Moon is drawn too large and/or too close to the Earth. I hope to allay the "Earth's shadow" misconception by showing the system to scale.

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

8 Comments

  4. pixflo on

    Thanks Ron, really interesting! I al ways wanted to test BGE for shadows applied to architecture, now I think I got an input! :)
    Cheers

    Reply
  6. corzair on

    Nice Sim!
    Is this just the Earth-Moon system primarily?
    As I was under the impression that when you add the sun into the system, the Moon sort of accompanies the Earth in orbit around the sun and not around the Earth as such - as that would make spiral patterns.
    Sorry if i'm not being clear I read something about this many years ago in a book called Astronomy with your Personal Computer by by Peter Duffett-Smith.
    Not that i'm a programmer or anything like that.

    Reply

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