In summer 2010, 750,000 children took a giant leap into the final frontier by joining Space Hop at their local library…
We wanted the site to give you the feeling of travelling through space. I initially tried rendering all the planets as 3D models in space, but the amount of curves needed to get them looking any good was was way too much for the processor. In the end we opted for what I think was a nice solution… we had all the planet animations rendered in 3D from studio max, then I output these to transparent video. I then stuck these videos into flat planes which always look at the camera lens, so as the camera flys through 3D space, the planets appear to be 3D themselves as they effectively rotate as the camera moves… sweet!