TITLE: soccer
NAME: Johannes Ewers
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: Johannes.Ewers@t-online.de
WEBPAGE: not yet
TOPIC: robot
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: soccer.mpg
ZIPFILE: soccer.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    povray 3.1e

TOOLS USED: 

- Moray 3.1 for all basic modelling,
- Microsoft J++ 1.0 Java development tool,
- Fast Movie Processor for converting images into AVI-clips 
- AVI2MPG V1.8  Mpeg Encoder for coding of final movie
- Photshop 4 for creation of "movie poster"

CREATION TIME: 
    about 60 to 300 seconds/frame, approx. 14 h for all frames

HARDWARE USED: 
    Celeron 433, 128 MB

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 

It's soccer time! 

VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
    MS Media Player works fine

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 

1. All objects (robots, stadium, ball, space objects) were created with Moray.
Each robot leg variant was constructed as a seperate object. Legs and robot
body are combined by a macro. 
2. The soccer game play was designed (with the help of my son who is a soccer
fan). For every robot a path over the play ground was defined. 
3. A Java program is used to generate a sequence of position and rotation
vectors following the paths. The position information are saved as intermediate
file for every frame.
4. The POV scene file goes through a main loop that reads the intermediate file
for a frame, positions all objects , and renders the frame images. The game is
rendered with 4 cameras.
5. All frames were assembled with 15 fps into an avi-file. Frame sequences from
different camera positions were merged to build the final sequence. The avi was
transformed and supersampled into a mpg-files with 30 fps.
As always it took more time than I had antissipated but was a lot of fun too.