a request for someone with skills in a 3d program of some sort

[The Dark Harlequin]

I am looking for a fairly simple drawing of the solar system for my homebrew. I have NO skills in making 3-d stuff (let alone the programs to do so) so i thought id see if someone here could whip something up for me.

The solar system is around a large dark reddish star. At approx earth's orbit, there are three planets (all in the same orbit, travelling at the same speed, and equidistantly placed around the sun)
One of these planets has a straight up and down axis (no seasons) and three moons.
Another planet has a normal earth axis-tilt and two moons.
The third planet is the most odd and is going to require some description.
It is actually two planets that have been brought together and connected with a giant cable that is roughly 100 miles in diameter. It holds the two planets roughly 100 miles apart from each other. This means that their atmospheres ineract. This planet system rotates along the axis of the cable to create its day and night cycle.
in a side view (parallel to the plane of the orbit of all three planets) the double system is tilted at roughly 45 degrees sorta like this
\ -----------Sun----
The two planets rotate around this 45 degree tilt to create the seasons for the two planets. In addition, directly perpandicular to the cable holding the planets together is a single moon

attached is my incredibly crappy drawing of this system,
the overhead view does not adequetely show the double planet system...but it may give a general idea.

I was hoping that maybe someone here (and ive seen some pretty impressive 3-d rendering skills) could create a simple image of this, preferably from an angle looking down on the whole thing, and with the double planet system in the front, but the other two see-able in the background.

Now this shouldnt be to scale or have any "planet-like" effects on the surface of the spheres, and it would be nice if the orbit of the planets was drawn out...
i dunno, at best I would hope for somethign with a sortof Manuel of the Planes look to it.
Anyone who can help me out with this, thanks very muchly

 

[s/LaSH]

Not a very useful response, but... have you ever looked at GMax? (http://www.discreet.com/products/gmax) It's free. And it's very good. You could try it yourself after flipping through the tutorials.

 

[The Dark Harlequin]

heh, sweet...someone actually replied...
i hate askign for requests cause no one ever answers...
ill try that program out, thanks for the tip

 

[Kryndal Levik]

I gave it a shot- let me know if there are any cosmetic changes that you'd like made.

 

[The Dark Harlequin]

dang, thats awesome
very nice, only thing that would make it perfect is the double planet being at a likttle more of an angle...like thats at about 20-30 degrees, and the planet system should be more of a 45-50 degree angle...
sweet though and thanks man
sorry for misspellings, i am quite the drunk...
better later...oh yesa

 

[Kryndal Levik]

Here ya go.

 

[The Dark Harlequin]

heh, nearly perfect, only one small change needs to be made, a single moon should be orbiting the double planet, but ya...wow very nice and even colored
thank you very much dude

 

[The Dark Harlequin]

and as another question...does anyone know how to get a jpg or something out of Gmax?
i can only figure out how to save it as a strange gmax only file...

 

[s/LaSH]

There is only one way I know of, and it's inferior to actual renderers like 3DStudio which are designed to do so, but whne I want a screenshot I use the Windows screenshot key (I believe it's ALT-Sysreq or ALT-PrintScreen or whatever you've got in the 'weird' section of your keyboard). That takes a screenshot you can paste into another program like Photoshop (if you're lucky), Paint Shop Pro 4 (if you want a demo that doesn't expire), or The GIMP (free and worth every penny) - or Paint, if you want, but it doesn't offer many options. Anyway, they all offer you the option to save as JPG. What you really want is the ability to crop the image, for which you'll want something other than Paint, because menu bars have no place in a render shot.

It's fiddly, but I managed to make a short movie (say, oh, three seconds) with some additional software, just taking screenshots out of GMax. It was from one of the demo sequences - a robot standing up or something. Pretty good for a program specifically designed to do anything but produce rendered images.

 

[Tsyr]

Well, for image editors, my favorite for most things is either Paint Shop Pro 7 (It's a tough expensive, but worth every penny...) and for other things it's openCanvas 2, which is a bit less expensive, and also worth every penny.

Both of those programs together cost me about 1/4 what a copy of Photoshop would cost, and I really havn't lost much... Oh, sure, there are a couple of things in Photoshop I wish I could do (The ability to map an image to a polygon to make it appear to be on an angle... With practice, you can sort of fake the effect by skewing the image and such in other programs, but it's not the same), but...