Imagine moving thousands of kilometers a second over the Earth. A visually 'linear' descent to Earth reveals the magnitude of any lateral changes (longitude and latitude). Unfortunately, altitude isn't the only factor when creating perceptually smooth large-scale animations. This way, it's easier to understand how attributes are being affected so you can adjust accordingly. When planning such a move, be sure to enable Logarithmic Altitude before you start animating.

For other projects, you'll have to manually enable it in the Animation > Advanced menu.Īs explained above, Logarithmic Altitude is a necessity when animating over massive changes in altitude. In Quick Start projects, Earth Studio automatically detects when Logarithmic Altitude is needed and enables it accordingly. More advanced usage reveals a few shortcomings and considerations, which will be covered below. Right: An adjusted logarithmic move that we perceive as linear.įor simple moves, Logarithmic Altitude is highly effective. Left: An unadjusted, linear camera move that looks like it's speeding up. The resulting motion compensates for our perceptual deficiencies and appears perfectly linear / constant.

It's called logarithmic because Earth Studio uses a near-logarithmic formula to calculate these changes. When enabled, logarithmic altitude will move the camera faster out in space and slower as it approaches the Earth. Our brains take this to assume we're moving faster.Įarth Studio offers an experimental feature called Logarithmic Altitude to counteract the speeding-up effect. This is an issue of human perception-our points of reference on the Earth seem to scale much more dramatically as we near the surface. OverviewĪ camera, moving at a constant speed towards Earth, will seem to move much faster the closer it gets to Earth. We counteract these issues with a feature called Logarithmic Altitude. Predictably, this raises some issues in the context of animation. Earth Studio requires us to deal with massive changes in scale.

Animated movies of earth spinning