Modelling Galaxy Collisions in Maya - Animations
At first the dust component was modelled using the glow and shader
components in the renderer. This is a 2d postprocess and suffered from
considerable flickering as the particles were drawn at different
brightness levels.
Later animations were done by creating a separate 'dust' component
which is rendered as a 3d cloud object. This behaves better
physically, and the images do not flicker at all. However the effect
does not look so good, since the cloud edges are too clearly defined.
Newer animation
This is a more recent animation which overcomes the flickering problem
by rendering the dust component as separate 3d cloud objects. Each
galaxy has 2000 stars.
Older animations
These are older animations using the 2d postprocess to render the
dust, which looks better than the 3d cloud object for still images,
but flickers considerably in animations.
2000 frames computed, every 10th frame displayed. The galaxy that was
initially stationary can be seen to start moving to the left towards
the end due to the attraction of the other galaxy.
2000 frames computed, every 5th frame displayed. Same scene as above
but this animation has a moving camera. This is a little confusing
since it is hard to distinguish the apparent motion due to the camera
movement from the actual motion of the stars in the galaxies.