TITLE: Gladiators NAME: Steve Townrow COUNTRY: England EMAIL: steve@kanku.freeserve.co.uk WEBPAGE: www.kanku.freeserve.co.uk TOPIC: Robot COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. MPGFILE: gladtrs.mpg RENDERER USED: Cinema 4D XL v5.3 TOOLS USED: Cinema 4D XL v5.3, Photoshop 4, CMPEG CREATION TIME: Difficult to quantify. Many evenings and most weekends for 3 months. Hundreds of hours. Final render time: 104 hours. HARDWARE USED: Pentium II, 333 Mhz, 8 Mb Open GL graphics, 192 Mb ram. ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: Gladiatorial combat between two robots in the style of ancient Rome. One is rusty, nervous and reluctant; the other is shiny, bold and cocky... The animation was inspired by the films Spartacus and Ben Hur and incorporates elements from both - gladiators on wheels! VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: ActiveMovie for Windows 95/NT works well. It looks OK on my PC but it can appear dark on some. Please adjust your monitor's gamma until it looks like it is set in midday sun. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: This is my first full animation and is modelled and rendered entirely in Cinema 4D XL (C4D). However, I believe I have used none of the features unique to the XL version - so this could have been done with the more basic Cinema 4D GO version. The only other programs used were Photoshop for texture creation and the frames were assembled using CMPEG. No post processing of the frames was performed other than in Photoshop to achieve the fade-out and fade-in near the end. As there are quite a few scenes, I found it was necessary to script the action with a storyboard. My biggest concern was getting the story across in under 5Mb. This proved to be difficult without compromising the story, so rather than drop some scenes, I decided to render it slightly smaller. The helm of the shiny robot is based on an original Thracian helm. The scythe-blades on his wheel where inspired by those on a chariot in Ben Hur. The most intricate parts of the models are the hands - particularly the thumbs. I wanted a sharp contrast between the two robots and this is achieved by their helms and textures. The helm of the rusty robot is based on helms used by the Samnites. The rust texture is based on one by Bryan Leister/Dirk Beichert from Deepshade (the free C4D texture site) but I have reworked it extensively for this animation. The arena is mainly modelled out of one stone block duplicated many times since C4D does not yet have instancing where you can create a logical copy. This had a huge overhead in the file size (hence no ZIP archive) which meant that the renderer would take few minutes to get going for every frame. The stone texture was created using C4Ds built-in 3D Earth Texture which took a lot of tweaking to get just right. The drapes were modelled by hand from a sub-divided plane by manually pulling the points about. The other periphery such as the banners, poles and gates where built from simple geometry. I wanted to use a more widescreen aspect ratio (1.73:1) and so I opted to render it at 304x176. Most MPEG players seem to cope well where the dimensions are multiples of 16 pixels so it shouldn't be a problem. On a personal note, I have enjoyed this immensely and will certainly use the characters again. Much of the animation deals with introducing the characters, their personalities and having them react to each other. I have many ideas for subsequent animations with more visual jokes and interaction between them. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Original rust texture by Bryan Leister/Dirk Beichert - available at Deepshade. Thanks to Geoff Austin who helped with the storyboard and gave me valuable advice and feedback. Steve Townrow Web: www.kanku.freeserve.co.uk Email: steve@kanku.freeserve.co.uk Email: stephen@sysdeco.co.uk