TITLE: Perpetual Robo-regulator NAME: Ed Brannin COUNTRY: Rochester, New York (State, NOT City), USA EMAIL: brannins@hotmail.com WEBPAGE: http://www.idrive.com/brannins/Web/Ray.html TOPIC: Robots COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. MPGFILE: perpetul.mpg ZIPFILE: perpetul.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray v3.1 TOOLS USED: CMPEG for MPG, Adobe PhotoDeluxe (came with my Scanner) for the Poster. CREATION TIME: about an hour to render + 2.5 minutes to MPG-encode. HARDWARE USED: AMD K6-2 300, 128MB RAM & AMD K6-2 233, 96 MB RAM & a Zip Drive ;) ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: In the year 2361, the Philsopher's Stone of Physics is finally created: the Perpetual Motion Machine. One of the problems that prevented the accomplishment in preceeding centuries was the lack of technology capable of monitoring and controlling a near-infinite number of reactions and respond to correct minute variances much faster than a human could even detect them. The robot of our scene, a floating chrome sphere, flies around the critical point of the apparatus as it scans and manipulates with its purple beam-thing. The plasmaball is the perpetually accelerated - and generated - object. While it isn't big enough for much practical use, it's firmly in place as a prototype. This is my first entry into the IRTC, and my second distinct animation. I like rendering objects that move on mathematical paths, such as the trig functions. VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: Best viewed at your system's Highest color depth. (TrueColor / 32-bit) I look at this with the default Windows Media Player. This is a cyclic animation, so I suggest setting loops (times played) to infinite, or at least anything above 1. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: I used POV-Ray to make all of the frames, with the spheres' X & Z coords being in "Trig form" notation (cos q, sin q), and the ball's Y is an Absolute Cosine curve Y = abs(cos(radians(Angle))) . The main platform is a cylinder, and the thing sticking up in the middle is a CSG Merged Cylinder + Sphere - I never could figure out just why the cylinder part stands out so much against the spherical part. There are two spheres, one with a cylinder going to the middle thing, and the other being at one end of a cone, also going into the middle.