TITLE: Pop!, or Positively No Food or Drink in the Lab
NAME: Greg M. Johnson
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: gregj56590@aol.com
WEBPAGE: http://members.xoom.com/gregjohn
TOPIC: Animations, Microcosms
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: pop1.mpg
ZIPFILE: pop1.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    PovRay 3.1 for first part and 3.02 for second part.

TOOLS USED: 
    cmpeg; Corel Photopaint to create JPG's and copyright.

CREATION TIME: 
    about 24 hours for first part and about 60 for second part.

HARDWARE USED: 
    Aptiva 450 MHz Pentium II

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 

In the Metal Men's latest adventure, a basic laboratory safety less has to be
re-learned the hard way.

In Part One, an urgent communication is received from the pilot of a spacecraft
shrunk down to nanometer size. His shrink capacitors are failing and he must
abort the mission. He demands that the graduate assistant in ChemLab transport
him immediately to the enlargement port. The enlargement port is the only safe
place for him to return to normal size.

The camera then zooms away from the craft as it gets caught up in the tides of
gravity and van der Waals forces with the nearby molecules.

In Part Two, we see Dr. Shaft's graduate student hard at work at his station in
ChemLab. His job is to monitor the results of the experiment while the craft is
in nanometer scale. 


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 

At perhaps less than full speed.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 

Part One:
Text objects with ambience as a function of clock display the pilot's urgent
communique.
Then we switch to a high-magnification view of molecules and the spacecraft
"swarming" according to an algorithm that I created, in POP1.POV.
The algorithm has ten or eleven different actors, whose velocity is altered by a
function of their average position.

Part Two:
The graduate assistant is a blob, and yes, a Metal Man, and therefore has a nice
reflective skin with a copper luster.
The fact that he is a blob allows for some fun after his mistake.  I used the
same algorithm as in Part One.  The animation here could have been more
interesting, with more individual atoms, but the extreme render cost of this
blob prevented extensive experimentation.