TITLE: RoyBots Daybreak
NAME: Roy Stahl
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: Roy@StahlTrek.com
WEBPAGE: www.StahlTrek.com
TOPIC: Robot Animation
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT
MPGFILE: roybot2.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Cybermotion, POV

TOOLS USED: 
    Cybermotion, POV, Moray, AVI2MPEG, PaintShop Pro

CREATION TIME: 
    ~ 50 hours, although improvments in Cybermotion could now cut
that to 10-20

HARDWARE USED: 
    PIII 500Mhz 128MG RAM

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 

RoyBots were created as more than a one time animation.  Let's start from the
beganing.
RoyBots are a life from that has been around for millions of years on a planet
that is 
about 35 lightyears from earth.  Life started purely based on silicon, and
developed to a 
fairly advanced society.  (Check out the website for more as I develop it.)  But
they were 
missing something, culture and identity.  They set up an antenna array and
search the heavens
for answers to questions: Who are we? Is there more life out there.  Then they
started
receiving transmissions.  It took a while to decode them, but they were
transmissions from 
earth.  They like the culture and identity of earthlings.  Soon Roybots started
to mold 
themselves in the images they saw.  We began this animation in 1999.  You see
the beganing
of a day on their planet and two typical Roybots.  First you see the power
conduit power up,
and then the control panel lights up.  RoyBot one emerges from bed and heads
over to close
his pod.  Suddenly, there is a large noise from pod #2.  Sounds like an overflow
blast from
a control valve.  Roybot #1, (no names yet) turns around to hear Roybot #2
complain about a 
horrible stench in Pod #2.  Roybot opens the door manually and we leave the
scene with Pod #2
opening and Roybot #2 caught in the act.  There will be a sound track added soon
that will of
course add a new dimension to this, and take it well over 5Meg.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 

I started with modeling items and Moray, which I have been using for a long time
now.  But
when I saw CyberMotion, I migrated to it for its animation capabilities.  I
tried to translate
between the two through a series of steps, but found that I could only get some
items from 
Moray into CyberMotion, so I switched to CyberMotion for the bulk of the work. 
The power 
conduit was done by using the partical system.  One bubble was place and a set
of properties
were applied to it.  The animation was done in segments of about 20-50 frames at
a time.  
At the time Cybermotion took 10 hours to complete, which ment it was rendered
overnight. At 
the end of December the rendering engine was increased in speed by about 400%
and thus it was
taking 2-3 hour for the last segment.  The control panel was done by creating 20
TIFF files 
and having them cycle through.  This was a huge task, and because I didn't run
samples in the
scene lighting, I got very poor results.  The test results with different
lighting were great.
Lesson learned:  Created the static scene and all lighting, TEST all elements in
this environment.
It seems like common sense now, but I learned the hard way.  Now I have a sample
file that
contains very few items, but has the room set up with lighting.  No touch-up was
done on any 
thing after rendering.  My goal is to create many RoyBot videos all 3-10meg
clips and publish
them on www.StahlTrek.com my personal home page.  I will take any comment and
suggestions from
anyone.  Modeling is not my strong suit, I like to dream up and create.