Animation - The Tilt of the Planets

Been re-reading a bunch of the older favorites, and then I had a hot debate with my younger brother (again) about axial tilt and Mars' lack of a magnetic field the other day. It made me want to throttle him but we do this all the time, so instead I decided to try to help him visualize the concept. That's worked on him (and others) with the stacked spin stuff, which I'm still working on too, but I needed something fresh to attack.

Our story so far:



I have plopped in all the planets and the sun, and sized them accordingly (using the Earth as 1 unit), but for now am keeping them 12 EUs apart for ease of access. What I'm hoping to show is kind of a "story" unfolding, starting at the sun, then moving out through all the planets which will be emitting their charge, only of course I will show their tilts too. Perhaps be able to "wobble them" later in the video to show how the charge field not just causes the tilts but corrects them as well, keeping some semblance of stability.

https://i.imgur.com/SfGPlSF.jpg
(click to enlarge)

So I'd really like some ideas and feedback on this, how would it best show charge causing tilt? Should they all start flat and then we could show the charge "turning" them, one by one or something? Should it be higher quality? Do those particles completely suck?



Things already on my list to add/alter:

- space background, faded perhaps or blurred
- solar charge, all other planet's charges
- incoming charge channels per planet & sun
- might rotate the planets too, slowly just so it feels cool or "realtime" a little
- represent the ambient or galactic charge somehow, maybe animated transparent arrows like in the photon spin vids

I think after achieving this - that is to say, making it "legit" and accurate enough to share publicly, and make it so a layperson could understand it, perhaps even a child - I might be able to throw in the planet's magnetic fields as well. And at some point, start adding in the moons and further analyzing the theory. The magnetic fields could look really cool!

I can't, off the top of my head, remember the math for tilt. I have a vague feeling it is about the charge from other planets converging on the planet being tilted. Maybe you could post some snippets from the papers that you have found and/or your understanding of them. A bit of context might help us to see how to visualize it better. Although I think you have a good start already. Showing the charge emission of the bodies is the key concept to show. That may be a little difficult to do though, because the charge can reach a long way but it is hard to show that in this context. You may be able to resort to showing the charge vectors at the planet being tilted or even transition from the charge emission to the charge vector at the receiver.

Sure, the paper is here, for quick reference:
http://milesmathis.com/tilt.html

...and Part 2: http://milesmathis.com/tilt2.html

But for me the real juice that drove the point home was on his paper on Uranus and Neptune's magnetic fields.


http://milesmathis.com/uran4.pdf

So imagine something similar to that, at my Uranus. Charge "particles" coming from Saturn and Neptune at the proper inclinations showing how they "turn" Uranus and its charge links to theirs, in that fashion.

The diagram really helped me visualize it, but I think we can do a bit better with some simple animation and particles, and eventually some captions and "freeze" frame or slow-mo sections with text on the screen explaining things. Again, the goal is to make it apparent why/how the tilts are created by charge pressure.

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I agree, animating the planets is a must, something that needs to be done. I’d argue that we should always strive to create physical based models as opposed to animations, but between us, that may just be semantics. I think we have similar goals.  

The Solar System is a field of interacting charged particles in our local corner of the galaxy. My personal belief is that even stripped down – a sun and planets only system is a bit beyond our ability at present. I also believe that our extremely related project - to model interacting charged particles - will result in creating an interacting charged particle physical modeling framework. Exactly what we’ll need in order to a proper job of animating the solar system – including tilts.
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Sure, Airman! I'm still very interested in physical modeling, but the problem I ran into is quite simply Maya can't do it out of the box. At least not internally. It cannot represent or calculate stacked spins without scripting, and I don't even know where to start on that end of things. I don't know MEL or Python well enough, nor how to tell nParticles (Maya's internal "Nucleus" solver, also controls nHair and liquid dynamics, and even fluids) how to stack a spin. Nobody in the industry has any knowledge either. Not for free.

Really cool!

Thanks guys, I know this one is really rough so far but please bear with me. It'll get up to speed, and give us some models, angles, and ratios to play with later.

Here's an update, where I've plugged in the orbital paths and the actual inclinations and obliquities per "known" data:



An isometric side view:



Again, the distances between are not accurate, and just convenient for the setup. We may even toss in the asteroid field at some point, as it has some charge influence as well. Perhaps as much as Pluto?

So next I'll start adjusting for actual (relative to Earth-size) distances from the sun, and also eccentricity, although it's not important for this animation to begin with. In this one we're just showing the planetary tilts at conjunction. Later, that data will be good to have built in but for now I just wanted to set up the animation rigs so I wouldn't have to worry about that later. The hierarchies get dicey.

Just a minor update, using relative numbers (to the Earth's radius here) in a similar way Miles does quite often. That's just for the radii and distances, though - all the angular numbers should be accurate to data so far.