EMAIL: reuven53@aol.com NAME: Reuven Weiser TOPIC: Gadgets & Odd Devices COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Juggling Machine COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: http://www.yucs.org/~rweiser/ray/ RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.02 (though it would have been much easier with 3.1 had I known about macros) TOOLS USED: CMPEG - for MPEG conversion CREATION TIME: A few weeks of work and about 30 hours of rendering HARDWARE USED: Pentium MMX 166, 24 MB RAM VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: You may need to adjust the brightness setting on your monitor to ensure that the colors are neither too bright nor too dark. ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: This amazing Juggling Machine breaks the record for most objects juggled at once (formerly 11, if I'm not mistaken) by juggling 13 balls. No, it's not a perpetual motion machine; the paddles are moving very quickly (as they'd have to in order to accomplish this feat) and you need a sharp eye (or a pause button) to spot them. As the animation progresses, the camera's location and angle shift from tracing the path of a single ball to a stabilized, centered perspective. This is my first entry to the IRTC. I'm somewhat new to animation, so I'm looking forward to any constructive criticism you can give me. Also, the code is a bit messy. I hope that any of you who are interested don't have too much trouble deciphering it. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: First, I set up the motion of the balls (which I was actually working on already for a Juggling Man, who can now be seen on my web site). They do obey the laws of physics (y = y0 + v0*t + .5*a*t^2). I then set up the paddles "around" them. (I had to vary the motion of the paddles in order to make sure that they didn't pass through the balls.) I then built the machine, which was designed to "shadow" the pattern traced by the balls. I then arranged the background setting. No modeling tools were used in the creation of this animation. All parts are pretty simple. Obviously, the balls are spheres. The paddles are a union of cylinders. The tubes are differenced tori. The machine is a combination of meshes (for the sides and front) and cylinders and sphere (for the edges). The logo in the middle, my initials, is a union of simple text objects. The curtain is just a box with a ripples normal, and the stone platform and wooden floor are also just boxes. The spotlight was a nice way of making any further background settings irrelevant, besides the fact that one would expect no less for such a momentous performance. I wrote every bit of code myself, except for the textures of the gold, silver, stone table and wooden floor. I got those from the standard POV-Ray library. No post-processing tools were used.