It is generated in at 3-5 fps on an SP2 with 8 nodes with 4 pc class processors each. The Evolving Planet is a direct descendant of Ken Perlin's Fractal Planet. The extra dimension of time has been added to the noise functions, and the clouds have been decoupled from the continents. This is the type of thing you'll be able to do on consumer PC's in 5 years. If you visit the CAT you can play with this, which is much better than some cheesy mpeg because the controls let you mold the planet of your desires. For the geographically challenged Lisa Mackie has ported this back into java as the Webwide World. As you can see by selecting Planet X or by moving the Mars like scrollbar, you can change the paramaters quite drastically for different types of planets. This web version does not evolve like the 4-D noise function based Evolving Planet but uses a 3-D noise function like Ken's original planet and does not have the decoupled noise functions that allow the clouds to move on their own as in the SP2 version.
These video clips are 3 sec and 30 sec, respectively, all at 30fps and 480x480 resolution.
Windows Users: There is a serious bug in Windows Media Player, it will not play these back properly (as v7 this is still true, as of v9 it crashes). The freeware version of vmpeg17 will work, as well as any decoder based on MSSG's reference implementation or the Berkeley Group's high performance implementation. Apple's Quicktime and AOL's WinAmp also work except for a bit of stutter on the first few frames.
Alternate version (faster time step and more clouds - and less compression) The animations are made with a fixed starting time, and with the clouds evolving and rotating a little over twice as fast as the continents. In that configuration the SP2 delivers about 3 frames per second. There is also a live video recording (with minor edits to match the narration to the video), it's available here (30 MB), and here (200 MB). The framerate is higher than 3fps, but the function rendered is also simpler. These are both encoded with mpeg4, the first version is more highly compressed and saved as an Microsoft avi, the second is less highly compressed and saved as a Apple Quicktime mov.Below are pictures of the standard controls and a static image of the
planet.