TITLE: Visitor NAME: Nils Olav Kilen COUNTRY: Denmark EMAIL: nok@post8.tele.dk WEBPAGE: None at the moment, but working on it... TOPIC: Metamorphosis COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT MPGFILE: visitor.mpg ZIPFILE: visitor.zip RENDERER USED: POV-RAY 3.0 TOOLS USED: cmpeg (for MPEG-1 packing) with options -d1 and -m1 for high quality. CREATION TIME: Planning 2h Rendering 3h 30m, MPEG-1 encoding 2h 45m (approximately) HARDWARE USED: AMD 486 133 MHz with 52 MB of RAM and Tseng ET6000 graphics accellerator. ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: The fourth dimension has always intrigued me. If a four- dimensional object 'falls' through three-dimensional space, a 3D-'slice' of it will show up in our world. This object, made with the powerful 'julia'-object in povray 3.0, does exactly that. Rotating and changing color as it visits out 3D world. (Changing color? So this is - strictly speaking - a 5D object, but who cares?) This was all inspired by the fractals in the sample scenes accompanying povray. The final product looks a bit like a lump of silly putty constantly changing shape and size under the influence from rotational forces. Or maybe the sweet stuff used in candy- making? VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: I suggest vmpeg.exe for DOS or vmpegwin.exe / vmpegwing.exe for Windows 3.11/95/NT. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: I used sine functions to alter the color and rotation of the fractal object. The 'slice' was done by changing one of the slice vector components. The frames was rendered with clock values from 0 to 1, but I thought, after vieving a test rendering, that it would be nice to have the object come out of 'thin air' and vanishing again, so I put in an extra frame with a clock value of 1.5, resulting in a frame withoout any sign of the object. Then I put this extra frame in a couple of instances at the beginning and at the end of the .INI sequence before encoding the frames with cmpeg.