Building a Solar System with OpenGL
Transformation Graph associated with the planets Also available: PDF or Postscript versions.
Screenshot of planets using OpenGL	Gif animation of solar system in motion. Also available: Quicktime animation
Above are screenshots from an OpenGL program written to model the Solar System with all the planets and moons. It was designed using an object oriented approach where each planet, moon, whatever, is a Body object. Each Body can have any number of children (satellites), and its children can also have any number of children. With this tree structure set up one single call can be made to the root of the scene and then have it recursively call all its children. The planets and their moons are read into a file like this one. Notice that each planet is a child of the Sun and each moon is a child of its parent planet and the Sun. This file format was designed with the intent of adding or deleting objects without recompiling the program. All textures for this project were downloaded from JPL's Maps of the Solar System web page, and converted to binary PPM format. All C++ code written for this project can be viewed below... Makefile Body.cpp Body.h planets.cpp
All code used to create these images can be downloaded here -> hw11.tar.gz