Programming Tasks for Tu Nguyen [GSMST Intern]
Tu Nguyen is a fall semester intern from GSMST during 2025 Fall.
This page describes tasks assigned to Tu.
Main Objective: Creating an accurate Solar System with Unity.
- Check this page for some good starting points. You are welcome to use SimpleKeplerOrbits as the starting point and modify its scripts. What we want to do is able to calculate accurate orbital motions from given six orbital elements for a planet.
- You can find some relevant Unity tutorial videos (creating Solar System model) in YouTube such as
- SS Unity example → downloadable asset (not audio instruction)
- another example → downloadable script
- yet another one → no downloadable script
- Create the model in the Unity HDRP engine
- Create each planet model as an Unity asset so that it can be used in other projects. ← surface texture images of planets can be downloaded from https://www.solarsystemscope.com/textures/
- Create an accurate orbit from a given set of six orbital elements for a planet ← see Calculating orbiting body's position at a given time T. You will need to create a C# script for the calculation.
- Add UI controls to the model
- mouse tilt/swivel to change the view and zoom
- keystroke to turn on/off orbital paths
- keystrokes to zoom in a particular view (i.e., 'E' can zoom in to the Earth-Moon-Sun system while turn off all other planets)
- Create rendered models (two preferred ones: 1. WebGL and 2. VR/AR)
- Make sure to create a nice document describing step-by-step instruction on how you create the model. Also, the instruction can tell a 3rd person how to reproduce your model from the scratch on his/her machine. See an example at sunearthmoon.