One of our Tech 11 Projects was to create a 3D object in a program called Blender. Blender is freeware and can be downloaded at http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/.

I decided to make a Stargate -- A device used to initiate a wormhole that connects to another stargate.

In the TV show Stargate SG-1 a team of four people travel across the galaxy through these rings. A stargate looks like:

 http://www.wallpaperbase.com/wallpapers/movie/stargate/stargate_10.jpg

A picture I found online was a stargate made in Blender. This picture is very good and the person who made it recreated the entire gate room (the room with the stargate in it).

 http://www.shipbrook.com/jeff/raytrace/graphics/stargate.jpg

So using blender, I created my own stargate. My stargate looks like:

The orange triangles, and the weird traingle things next to them are called chevrons. A chevron is like a lock, in which when the inner ring spins, the chevron locks to create a "unique" set of symbols. A real chevron looks like this:

http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/a/af/Seventh_chevron.jpg

SFX

Our tech teacher wanted us to render our blender project. Unfortunately, I decided to go all out and make each chevron (the triangle on the outside of the ring) animated. Normally in order to dial a gate (stargate for short) to another galaxy, 7 chevrons are used. 6 as the end point (6 points in 3d space) and 1 home address.

After the stargate dials another stargate, something that we call a "kawoosh" forms. A kawoosh looks like this:

 http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/32/Kawoosh_side.jpg

Basically, whatever hits the kawoosh is immediatly destroyed. It is a very powerful side effect of the wormhole. There is that kawoosh pictured above, which comes from a regular stargate. A supergate (a really big stargate capable of fitting a giant spaceship looks like this:

 http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e0/Supergatekawoosh.jpg

Note how the kawoosh doesnt keep its round shape near the end.

But for my purpose in designing this stargate, I designed a regular stargate, so it will have a regular kawoosh. So my stargate's kawoosh looks like this:

USER POSTED IMAGE

Then the kawoosh goes back and leaves a watery texture called an event horizon. The stargate with the event horizon looks like this:

At the end of my movie, the stargate loses its watery event horizon. It does this by starting at the center, and dissapearing outward until there is just the stargate. So it looks like this:

 Please note: My water sucks, I know, I don't know how to make water in Blender.

Finally, the entire movie looks like this: (Note: sound is in the movie, so turn your sound on!)

So my movie has all 9 chevrons locking (when they move and "lock" the symbol into the computer) which is 2200 frames (88 seconds, roughly 1.5minutes), running at 25fps. I rendered it at 1080x1080 pixels and it took about 11 days to render on my other computer (I needed my main computer for other work, so it ran on a 1.2Ghz computer, instead of a 2.8Ghz computer.

For more information about the stargate device, go to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_%28device%29