Though the Heart

This is my fourth animation on my learning journey of Unreal Engine. I made this thinking of the 'night owls' out there, people who 'rise' when the sun comes down. The title comes from a special moment in the video. Please turn the sound on.

There are many things happening at the same time in this scene. I recommend watching it several times to take it all in.

The suns are rotating, their reflection on the water follows them, the colors in the sky are influenced by the combination of the lights and so keep changing, there are two partial eclipses, the stars around are moving in a strange pattern, there are birds occasionally passing by (a group of 3 birds pass 3 times...), plants wave with the breeze and even their color changes as the predominant sun changes, six stones start to float, a flower rises just a little, and obviously the main actor is rising and lowering.

The concept of binary stars is a recurrent topic in sci-fi and fairly common in movies of the genre. But have you ever imagined how could a sunset look like in such a system? Would the two stars simply come down at the same time? That would probably depend on the dynamic between the two stars. I imagined here that the sunset wouldn't be as simple as that. I imagined here very different stars, in size, mass and color and so they orbit around a common center of mass. The orange one is much heavier and so its oscillation is barely noticeable but it's there, if you pay close attention. Of course, I wasn't trying to make this realistic, I was aiming at beauty and imagination.

I'm also playing with time scales here. The suns and stars are rotating at high speed, the grass and birds are happening at normal speed, and time for her is happening at a slower speed.

And there's even a little additional symbol. Pay attention at the combination of shapes when the orange sun sets. Music by SamuelFrancisJohnson from Pixabay.