alice-teacher Animation of a rotating world

[Leonel Morales]

A happy 2015 to everyone!

For the first day of the new year I wanted to make a simple animation
of a rotating world with a light transition to simulate the dawn of
the first day of the year using Alice 3.1.

The resulting animation can be downloaded here:
ingenieriasimple.com/alice/RotatingWorld.a3p

I just wanted to comment some oddities:

1. For the world I used a sphere covered with a flat image of the
earth. It worked fine but covered the sphere not around the polar axis
but an axis in the equator. That was easy to fix but then I realized
that the map was horizontally flipped (east coast was west cost) and I
found no way to fix it from inside Alice. I had to edit the image to
flip it and then have Alice use it again and the result was fine.

2. In previous versions of Alice I remember it was possible to play
with the position of a light source, in this version it is only
possible to set the color from above or from below in the scene, so
instead of just rotating the world sphere I had to move the camera
around the world to achieve the desired light effect.

3. Uploading to YouTube continues to be one of my favorite features
but it is a little bit disappointing not being able to set the quality
of the resulting video. YouTube link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ojO1EhHG_k

Finally, just a new year's wish: wouldn't it be nice to be able to
post short animations to a platform like Vine?

All the best for 2015!

Leonel