Introducing Autodesk Maya 2013 Chapter 2: Modeling a Solar System

In this chapter the book mainly focused on getting me comfortable with Grouping, Hierarchy, and delves a little into hypershades. 

Here's a screen shot of my scene.

OKAY. So in the project I decided to get ahead of myself and try to make this project better. Initially the book only tells you to give a hypershade to ONE of the planets. Instead I decide to give hypershades to ALL of the planets. This would have been fine if I then hadn't decided to animate the sun to actually look like it was on fire. I also went and made sure that all of the planets were rotating the sun at the same relative speeds that they would in real life.

Here's my beautiful sun. As you can tell my particles aren't perfect (way too many solar flares), but I was pretty proud.

I'm going to be honest, I'm worked on this project a few months ago when I was 'trying' to get into maya, so now I'm not really sure exactly what went wrong. Now that I'm trying to go into my old project it looks like when I went in and rendered the Animation some of the planets would completely disappear from the scene and everything is an awkward color. I think I'll rework this at a later date, but follow this youtube tutorial.

Here's a screenshot of my rendered video.

It's hard to tell because it's all weird/black and white, but there are some moons rotating around a nonexistent planet. I don't know what makes THAT planet so different from the ones that I can view, but it's just not salvageable at this point. It's hard to even know what to search for to fix the problem. As you can see I added some paint effects to make it look amazing.

What I need to work on:

STOP GETTING AHEAD OF MYSELF. It ended up ruining the whole project  for me.

I was still able to learn valuable techniques in learning how to group and rotate objects, as well as learning to work with the Hierarchy in order to make sure the planets rotated around the correct axis. So, all in all, I still got everything I needed to out of this project, and more. However, it would be nice to have a finished product that's not all buggy.