In a previous post, I mentioned having a Bash alias that plays white noise and simulates being aboard Star Trek’s USS Enterprise. This got me thinking that it might be a good idea to try and create a video to accompany the SFX.
The star field animation was made in Blender and uses a particle emitter to generate the “stars”. I then placed a camera under the emitter and let the particles fall past it (I guess I used gravity where there should be no gravity). The animation was 1 minute (1440 frames @ 24fps) and I exported it to video. I then used Blender again to stitch together 10 copies with some cross-fading, before importing the SFX and exporting the final video.
The SFX was created with SoX using the following command:
sox -c1 -n warp-engines.wav synth 600 whitenoise band -n 100 20 band -n 50 20 gain +25 fade h 1 600 1Considering I’m a complete novice with Blender, I’m pretty happy with the result and it was a fun little project. When I get time, I’m definitely going to play around with Blender some more.
Big thanks to Grant Abbitt for his Blender YouTube channel, it was a massive help! If you’re a novice like me, give his Blender Complete Beginners Guide a try. Also, thanks again to the Late Night Linux podcast for the inspiration.
If you’re interested, you can download a zipped copy of my star field Blender file.