TITLE: iRobot
NAME: Aaron Gage
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: agage@csee.usf.edu
WEBPAGE: http://www.csee.usf.edu
TOPIC: Robot
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: irobot.mpg
ZIPFILE: irobot.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Lightwave 5.6

TOOLS USED: 
    Lightwave's modeller and LScript language

CREATION TIME: 
    6 weeks modelling, about 30 hours rendering

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD Athlon 600, 128MB RAM

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 


Introducing the iRobot, the latest in easy-to-use consumer electronics.
It is a 4-degree-of-freedom manipulator arm mounted on a mobile base,
equipped with a camera and the latest in artificial intelligence software.
It even obeys Asimov's laws of robotics, and solves blocks world problems!
Order yours today!  Available in these colors: snozberry, parrot green,
rose amber, and frosted indigo.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


This was my first real project using Lightwave.  Now, I have been a loyal,
long-term user of POV-ray, working only with a pen and paper and a text
editor on a 486 for years now.  However, after buying Lightwave and a
computer to suit it, it seemed a shame not to put it to use.

When all I had used was POV-ray, I thought very little of animations done
using RayDream or TrueSpace or 3DS or Lightwave (or possibly even Blender)
because I assumed that with tools that powerful, the animation (whatever it
was)
must have been trivial to create.  While I now know what these packages are
really capable of, I sought out to make this animation technically
challenging for myself, if for no other reason than to learn more about
Lightwave.  Lightwave provided me with two things that POV-ray by itself
did not: a powerful 3D modeller, and the ability to preview animations at
full resolution and true framerate in wireframe or OpenGL.  Finally having
a computer made on this side of 1995 also helped.  It turns out that
my POV-ray experience came very much in handy, as well.  Anyway.  Enough
disclaimers.

I made the entire robot model from scratch in Lightwave's modeller.  This
was a very involved process, but it resulted in distinct units that I could
manipulate: the shoulder (the lowest blue segment), the elbow (the part
with the transparent blue shield), the forearm with the chain, the wrist
which could be rotated, and the gripper.

The elbow section was all controlled by parenting everything about it to
a Null object (essentially, just something that can take transformations,
which are then applied to anything parented to it).  The gears in the
elbow actually do move properly as the elbow moves; this was my first
script written in LScript.  LScript is a scripting language that looks
very much like a cross between C and POV-ray's scripting language (which,
in fact, it probably is).  Based on the rotation of the Null mentioned
before, the gears would rotate themselves properly.  In the chain nestled
in the forearm, there are 54 separate links, each of which has its own
script to define its motion.  If you look closely, you can see them wrap
around the cogs at either end of the arm, which took a LOT of tweaking to
get right.  I didn't see how Lightwave's inverse-kinematics features would
have helped me to move the arm around, so I did not use it.  All of the
motion was handled through keyframes.  Also in the elbow is a cord which
uncoils and stretches as the elbow rotates.  This was handled primarily
by morphing the coil while stretching and rotating it.  The gripper at the
end of the arm was morphed open and closed, rather than actually having
the pieces move in synchrony.

The parts between the flythroughs were done by taking the last frame of
the previous section, letting Lightwave use that as a background image,
then applying an emboss image filter, then rendering it.  I then set the
resulting image as the new background, placed text objects in open space,
and rendered again.  Thus, even these sections were created without the
use of outside utilities.

The textures were all done from scratch as well, with three exceptions: the
gold texture on the chain was a sample provided with Lightwave, and one
of the wood textures was a modified sample.  The wallpaper on the top
half of the wall in the last segment is a stock Lightwave texture.

I plan to put all of my lightwave objects (and various scenes) which went
into this animation into the zip file, for those of you who are interested.