TITLE: "Chloe and the Paperwad"HOMETOWN: Hartselle, Alabama, USA

NAME: Steve Sloan II
EMAIL: ssloan@HiWAAY.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.HiWAAY.net/~ssloan
TOPIC: Games
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: chloe.mpg
ZIPFILE: chloe.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray, a yardstick, CMPEG, and the POV 3.02 docs

CREATION TIME: 
    Rendering time roughly 7 hours, total
               Conversion time: 4 minutes, 2 seconds (242 seconds)

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD K6-200, with 32 M RAM

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 


After a brief message from the "production company," and a title
animation, my little movie starts. My cat Chloe tries to catch a
"paperwad" thrown back and forth by two people. My living room is
the backdrop.


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
    I like VMPEG best.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


Jumping and Throwing
--------------------
I wrote several new macros to simulate the motion of throwing the
paperwad, the flight of the paperwad (and cat) under gravity. I also
used my macro-based spline generator to create the body and tail of
the cat.

MPEG Compression
----------------
A little tip: try using Smacker Tools
( http://www.radgametools.com/ ) to create the *.lst file for cmpeg.
Smacker uses the same format for frame list files as cmpeg, so you
save a LOT of time by not typing the *.lst files.

In my experience, my "ipbmpeg" batch file does the best cmpeg
compression, with the smallest files, of all the variations I've
tried, and doesn't look significantly worse than the other two
compression options.

Things I had to remove:
-----------------------
The room had a nice, realistic-looking normal on the carpet, but it
wiggled around when I animated it, so I had to remove it. I also had
to use no_shadow remove the shadows cast by the throwing arms, because
you could tell from the shadows that the arms had no bodies! That
might work for a Halloween or horror category, but not here! ;-) If
I'd had more time, I would have added some Poser bodies to attach to
the arms.

I wish I'd had more time to work on this project. I would definitely
make the cat's jumping motion more realistic, and I wanted to add
several scenes, including the cat sleeping on the coffee table, and
slowly waking up, and the cat walking across the table, and jumping
to the ground.