[rgerhards]

Hi all,

I am looking for a simple software to animate basic objects. I like to create educational animations, often on astronomy topics. So far, I am doing this under Windoze, but would like to do it in a plain Linux environment in the future. Currently, I often use specialized programs. However, I would also like to take a more generic approach to animating. For example, I am about to write an article about earth's rotation and the speed that an object (or person) has related to the latitude it is located. I would like to create an animation showing a globe with a spot on it. Then, I'd like to spin that globe a little and show how the spot moves. It would be good enough if I can create a plain color globe. Best, however, would be if I could add satellite images of earth as a texture. And now comes the hardest thing: I am actually not much of a graphics person, so I am looking for an as easy to use tool as possible.

A sample of previous work can be found here, so that you get an idea of what I am doing:

Earth observed from Mars

And feedback would be deeply appreciated.
Rainer

[adwilson99]

Blender should be what you are looking for blender.org - Home

One thing to note though and this will affect most 3D Graphics programs on linux, is that you will need OpenGL enabled in X windows to be able to use it. For this you must have a supported 3D Accelerated graphics card NVIDIA and ATI i think are the main players here, but there are others.

If you need a new Graphics card, this site may help in deciding what to go for Linux-drivers.org - Linux Hardware Compatibility Lists & Linux Drivers

Unfortunately although there is much controversy over their closed source drivers, I would personally got with an NVIDIA, again though do plenty of searches first to see what others are using as not all NVIDIA cards are supported and some work better than others.

[rgerhards]

Hi,

Thanks for the link, Blender acutally looks very powerful. I am curios how it will handle dummy me I'll give it a try.

Thanks,
Rainer

[Tinky Winky]

The GIMP actually supports animation and it's probably inculded with your distro.
It uses layer animation - each layer is a frame. See GIMP Help >> Animation for more details.