TITLE: Megalomania in C
NAME: Mark Wagner
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: mark.wagner17@gte.net
TOPIC: Robot
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: mw_robot.mpg
ZIPFILE: mw_robot.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray Megapatch 0.3

TOOLS USED: 
    GIMP, FMP to create an AVI file, MPEG Encode to convert the AVI file
to MPEG

CREATION TIME: 
    3 months creation, 74h 45m render

HARDWARE USED: 
    1 400MHz AMD K6-2, 3 450MHz Pentium IIs

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 

Late one night, deep in the heart of the MIT Artificial Intelligence laboratory,
an experimental subject wakes up and writes a computer program expressing how
it views its relationship with the world.

VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 

Don't use ActiveMovie Control or Microsoft Media Player except as a last resort,
since both these programs leave off the final frame.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 

All modeling was done internally in POV-Ray.  The computer is a simple CSG
construction, as are the robot arms.

Getting the robot arms to move properly was the hardest part of the project. 
Movement of the robot arms was controlled by specifying the bend angles of the
joints using splines.  The movement of the fingers was done in a slightly
different manner, by specifying the locations of the fingertips using splines
and then computing the joint positions using an inverse kinematics macro I
wrote.

The text displayed on the monitor is a POV-Ray text object built up
letter-by-letter as the movie progresses.  The glow from the monitor is done by
means of radiosity.  I'd like to thank Nathan Kopp for coming up with the
improved radiosity in MegaPOV.  Without it, this animation would have taken
approximately 1000 hours to render, instead of 74.

The WagnerDyne logos on the monitor and computer box are image maps created in
the GIMP.

The fade out at the end was done internally in POV-Ray.

Fast Movie Processor was used to convert the 220 MB of TGA files into an
uncompressed AVI file.  MPEG Encode was then used to convert the AVI into an
MPEG movie.