TITLE: Melvin's Happy-Time Speedy-Fast Driving Adventure NAME: Byron Bashforth COUNTRY: Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada EMAIL: bnb121@mail.usask.ca WEBPAGE: http://www.cs.usask.ca/grads/~bnb121 TOPIC: Transportation COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. MPGFILE: melvin.mpg RENDERER USED: 3D Studio Max POV-Ray 3.02 TOOLS USED: sPatch Crossroads Paint Shop Pro mpeg_encode CREATION TIME: Rendering: 19 hrs 27 min Encoding: approx 15 min HARDWARE USED: Dual Pentium Pro 200, 128 MB RAM, Windows NT 4.0 (rendering) Sun Ultra Sparc, 62 MB RAM, SunOS (encoding) ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: Please see the self-explanatory title: "Melvin's Happy-Time Speedy-Fast Driving Adventure" VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: This animation was encoded for playback at 24 fps. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: The idea ~'~'~'~' SETTING: Department of Computer Science Seminar. Someone is talking about something too complicated for most of the audience to understand. In the back of the room boredom and conversation break out simultaneously. BYRON: "Are you paying attention to this?" KEVIN: "Not a chance...I'm just grocery shopping in my head." BYRON: "Let me run this animation idea by you, there's this happy little roadster ripping through the country-side. All he wants to do is go as _fast_ as he can. Suddenly, out of no where, a bus appears..." KEVIN: "You know...anything with cows is funny." BYRON: "Moo..." KEVIN: "Moo..." BYRON: "So what's the car's name?" KEVIN: "Let's call him...Melvin" BYRON: "Moo..." Characters ~'~'~'~'~' Melvin's body, fenders, and interior were constructed with sPatch. Once imported into 3D Studio, other details were added, including the steering wheel, console, gear shift, CD collection in the glove compartment (just kidding), eyes, eyebrows, and mouth. The bus was also created with sPatch and then divided into four separate meshes (a mesh for the front, back, driver side, and passenger side). Each mesh was imported into 3D Studio and texture-mapped individually (with images created with Paint Shop Pro). Details, like the lights and grill, were added with 3D Studio Max. Bessie the Aerial Cow originated as a freeware model (downloaded from Avalon). It wasn't exactly what I wanted so I performed a little mesh surgery: removed horns, altered the tail, etc. Building the spotted texture map was probably the most difficult part of modelling the cow. Ever tried taking a flat bitmap and wrapping it around a cow-shaped object? The semi tractors and sedan were also derived from freeware meshes (again, downloaded from Avalon) and modified and textured to suit this animation. The trailers were textured with bitmaps created with Paint Shop Pro. Setting ~'~'~'~ To keep the environment looking like a cartoon, the background objects were modelled as simply as possible. The blue sky and puffy clouds were rendered with POV-Ray as a 5024x800 image and then used a cylindrical environment map in 3D Studio Max. Four different trees were created, each consisting of some deformed sphere perched above a couple of cylinders - replicated, scaled, and rotated to taste. Easter eggs ~'~'~'~'~'~ The maroon sedan that Melvin passes in the first scene is being driven by Dancing Baby Cha-Cha. The sign on the back of the senior tour bus reads "How's my Driving? Call 555-Slow". The first truck that blocks Melvin's attempt to pass the bus is a dairy truck carrying an advertisement for "Happy Cow Farms". The slogan along the bottom of the box says "Happy Milk from Happy Cows". The second truck is labelled "Three Nerds and a Geek Piano Movers". Immortalized forever on the side of the box is a picture of myself and three of my friends who contributed ideas and their own sense of humour to this animation. The people in the pictures are (in order from the front of the truck to the back) Greg, Lee, Byron (myself), and Kevin. We are still deciding who deserves the distinction of being the geek. Its not really an easter egg, but in case you missed it...yes, its a big hotdog on the back of a truck. Factoids ~'~'~'~' This is my first project using 3D Studio Max and also my first attempt at making an animated character. 256 MB of disk space was consumed storing 1135 frames (as ppm files). 87,168,000 pixels were rendered. The MPEG encoding achieved a compression of 70:1. Only three cows were injured in the making of this animation. Acknowledgements ~'~'~'~'~'~'~'~' Thanks again to Kevin, Lee, and Greg for their ideas and continual interruptions: "Don't worry about your thesis...How's Melvin?" Thanks to the Computer Graphics and Vision Lab (of which I am a member) in the Computer Science Department, University of Saskatchewan, for the use of their software and hardware. The original cow and sedan meshes were obtained from Avalon. (http://avalon1.viewpoint.com) The original semi tractors (by Jim McInnis) were also obtained from Avalon. sPatch was fundamental to this project. You _need_ this software. (http://home.earthlink.net/~mclifton/spatch.html) Crossroads was used for converting meshes into 3DS format. (http://www.europa.com/~keithr/Crossroads/index.html) Paint Shop Pro was used for creating texture maps. (http://www.jasc.com)