TITLE: PinDrop The Universe on the head of a pin. NAME: Mike Norton COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: manorton@jps.net WEBPAGE: http://www.jps.net/manorton/3d TOPIC: Microcosms COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. MPGFILE: pindrop.mpg ZIPFILE: pindrop.zip RENDERER USED: Blender3D for Linux V1.53 TOOLS USED: Rhino3D, mpeg_encode CREATION TIME: About one month HARDWARE USED: 133 MHz Pentium with 32 meg Ram ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: I searched the furthest reassess of my mind to come up with a subject for this topic. I even did a search on www.dictionary.com to get some ideas. Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) web1913 Microcosm \Mi"cro*cosm\, n. F. microcosme, L. microcosmus, fr. Gr. mikro`s small + ko`smos the world. A little world; a miniature universe. Hence (so called by Paracelsus), a man, as a supposed epitome of the exterior universe or great world. Opposed to macrocosm. --Shak. I went with the little world idea. I remember an old saying about fitting the universe on the head of a pin. So that is what I shot for. This is my first time entering the animation comp. I have entered the still many times but wanted to get my feet wet trying a new media, animation. It is also my first time using Blender3D. I had to learn as I went, and all the guys on EFNet's #blender3d are due a ton of thanks for giving me some tips and help. Especially Zr. Thanks man!. The idea is you fly into the molecular structure of the pin and find yourself flying through the galaxy. You then plummet into earth and fly along the surface until you head down into the depths of our planet. Once you reach the center of the earth it all starts over again. But don't put the animation on loop, its really not set up to loop, just going for a concept of getting smaller and smaller. I hope you like it. I sure had fun putting it together. VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: ActiveMovie for Windows 95/NT works best. If you have a good system in Linux you might get away with mpeg_play but the frame rate needs to be 30 FPS. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: First things First. If you have not tried Blender3d I would suggest that you install Linux and give this incredibly detailed and feature packed free animation tool a go. I really cant believe all the things you can do with it. Http://www/blender.nl Ok, I got the concept for the animation and story boarded it. I figured out that I needed 4 scenes with varying camera positions in the first scene. I then modeled the pin for scene one with Rhino. I could have used Blender but I am still not up to speed on modeling with it yet. I still need to purchase the manual, of which I plan to do shortly. I imported the pin into blender and set up scene one in 4 different positions. It is actually 4 different scenes in one but whos counting. I set the pin on a constant rotation and make it come past the camera. Once this is done I take each section and use the built in sequence editor to piece them together with some nice cross fades to black between each shot to give some spacing. The pin then comes and bounces on the floor. Blender is not a ray tracer so getting reflections is not possible. So to cheat this I found a cheat. I copied the object and its motion path and mirrored it below the plane. The plane has the alpha set to allow it to be transparent. The affect looks very realistic for the short time it is happening. But if you look closely you can see that the lighting on the mirrored version is incorrect for the scene, but it works for now. The space fly through was started about 2 dozen times. I could not figure out how to get it to work the way I wanted it to. I actually tried scaling everything to actual solar system scale but did not have enough space in blender. So I cheated a little bit. I first used a large cylinder with a star map applied to it for the back ground but when you got close to a planet it made some of the stars stretch along the x axis and it did not look good. Blender has a built in star generator that I tried to stay away from at first because I did not have it set right and it is a resource hog when looking through the camera view. But I got things set right and really like the outcome. For one thing the stars are in actual 3d space. When you fly through space the stars move past you. The sun is a built in lens flair affect. Each planet uses image maps applied to spheres. The earth has a map for the surface, a map for the clouds and a halo for the blue glow that the atmosphere gives off. I had a lot of fun working on the Earth Fly through scene. The materials all came together as if by magic. The water, the clouds, the mountains, all really came together. The water is a large plane. There are 3 planes for the clouds one on top of the other. They have a cloud texture applied to them with transparency set so you can gradually see though it. I had more clouds but found I only needed three plans to get the desired affect. There is one problem with this section that I was unable to get a work around for yet. When the camera comes down through the plans of clouds it does real well until the camera breaks through the previous plane. Then a flash to the next plane texture gives a kind of strobe appearance. I am going to see if I can come up with a work around to make the decent more smooth later on. The mountains are a DEM file of the Monterey California cost line. I converted the DEM to a TGA and applied the noise feature to a subdivided plane. This is one of the sweetest ways I have seen to make height fields. You have tons of control. I added a mist so you came into the mountains as if to run onto a shore line. The earth decent scene also took some doing. I wanted a real wild ride. I tried my hand at modeling a tube in blender but still lack good blender modeling know how. So back to Rhino. I created a meta curve and then railed a shape to make the tube. Then the fun began. I imported it into blender and placed the camera at the top and entered a key. Then I moved to the end and went to the frame number I wanted to end on and entered a key. Then in the middle, arranged the camera and basically continued through each frame to make sure the camera stayed on track. The couple of jerky places in this sequence are due to some very sharp corners. So don't get sick to your stomach. I arranged all the scenes in the blender scene editor and applied crossfades and transitions where need be. Then rendered the images and encoded them using mpeg_encode. This was a very fun project and I learned a lot about the whole process. I hope to enter the next round also. Happy Rendering