TITLE: A Rose is a Rose is a Rose NAME: John VanSickle COUNTRY: US of A EMAIL: vansickl@erols.com WEBPAGE: http://www.erols.com/vansickl/povray.htm TOPIC: Decay COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. MPGFILE: rose.mpg ZIPFILE: rose.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1g for Win9x. TOOLS USED: text editor, cmpeg, pencils, paper CREATION TIME: Each frame (after the title sequence) took about 20 minutes to render, so I suppose it took about two weeks to render all of the frames. VIEWING RECOMMENDATION: Full color, 24 frames per second. HARDWARE USED: K6-2 @ 300MHz, 32 Megs of RAM ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: Okay, so it's not really a rose. Rusty struggles against two forms of decay; he's one year old as of this round, so I guess he's feeling his age. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: I typed out a bunch of scene code, rendered the frames, and slapped them together with an MPEG compiler. Someone whose name escapes me at the moment gave me his registered copy of MainActor, but I have since found that I can get better results with CMPEG; CMPEG is a bit more difficult to use, but it allows for much better control. The opening title is simple CSG. There's a bit of modulo math to make the characters all go where they should. The subtitling is done by calculating the up, right, and direction vectors based on where I'd decided to put the camera. The text is then placed as if the camera were at the origin and pointed in the +z direction, and then the text is moved into place using the Matrix() macro. All of my Rusty animations have used subtitles in this fashion. The files in the archive are: rose.pov: The main scene file. rose_s*.inc: The scene files for each of the twelve shots. rose_t*.inc: These files set up the titling, fades to black, and fades from black. rosetext.inc: This declares most of the textures used in the animation. rusty.inc: The ever-famous Rusty. rusty_l.inc: Rusty's display is defined here; he didn't have any lines in this one, so not much happens here. chezrust.inc: This creates the interior of Rusty's house. darkvale.inc: Petrified Orchard Valley, as seen after dark. spline.inc: My spline macros. macs.inc: My Thoroughly Useful macros. rosiepic.inc: Creates the framed picture seen on the table by the mirror. rosiepic.tga: The picture. mirror.inc: There is a mirror next to where Rusty paints himself. tv.inc: The TV set. It uses a series of image files that aren't included in this archive. brick.gif: The outside of Rusty's house (which is not seen in this animation) has a brick texture. This is a bump_map for it. spray.gif: That paint splat seen near the end of the animation is in here. spray.inc: This creates the spray cans. flower.inc: This creates the flower. vase.inc: The vase with the flower in it. vase.gif: The material_map for the vase. pic.inc: This file takes most of the work out of putting a framed picture on the wall. table*.inc: There are three different kinds of tables in the animation. oddclock.inc: The seven-sided clock with octal numbering is defined in here. measure.pov: I use this for determining the width of text objects. fade.pov: This is the file that generates the fade that shows time passing. stars.inc: That handful of stars seen at the end of the anim come from here. bill.inc: This file contains the passwords to the Swiss bank account where Bill Gates keeps most of his money. There is a ten million dollar per day limit on withdrawls. If you have any other questions about things, e-mail me directly, or leave comments on the comments page.