TITLE: Save the Robot
NAME: Karl Pelzer
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: KarlPelzer@t-online.de
WEBPAGE: nope
TOPIC: ROBOTS
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: str.mpg
ZIPFILE: str.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.1g official

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray 3.1, Explode.inc, Link.inc and AutoClck.mcr by Chris Colefax,
posttool, CMPEG, CMPEG3 by Sander, NK Flare by Nathan Kopp
RENDER TIME: about 190 hrs 

HARDWARE USED: 
    Celeron 300@450 64MB, PII 350 128MB


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 


If you think the animation is too dark turn down the lights in your room. That
will underline the atmosphere ;-))
Big sorry for the low quality, but it is explained in the "Description of
how..." section.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

Please don't take the following lines too serious, it's just my kind of humor
and a nice story for this animation!

" In the beginning of the 20th century, industrialization forced people to work
in factories under hard conditions. Charlie Chaplin showed us in his film
"Modern Times" (I hope that's the right english title) how these cricumstances
can bring harm to people. 
In the end of the 20th century, robots took their place and are now working ever
harder. Almost 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, almost no breaks, no holidays no
salaries and people harvest the fruits of their work.
Dont't you think it's time to go out and "save a robot"? Don't hesitate! Go
ahead! " 


The title for the animation was taken from the former "MAYDAY" (an anual German
techno party in Dortmund) motto "Save the robots". First I intended to do an
animation with thousands of working robots in a giant hall. But due to lack of
time I reduced it to one single and nameless robot. I hope you like him.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

This is my first multiscene animation and I had to learn by try and error, so I
lost a lot of time.
All indoor scenes don't use light sources. It's all just radiosity and one
emmitting media. My first drafts used a radiosity recursion level of 2 but the
animation was heavily flickering then. So I had to reduce the recursion level
to 1. This causes a lower quality and a less realistic look (sniff). But as you
can see, there's still flickering in it. Maybe there's a ranking for the worst
quality?
Since the intro scene uses only radiosity I only decreased the ambient light and
the emmiting media to get the effect of a darkening scene. 
All models are built with basic shapes and CSGs (no meshes!). I included the
MDL-file for Moray 3.1. Sorry for the german descriptions of the objects and
textures.
I used Moray to model a basic scene with all objects that came to my limited
mind. Then I used it to test the different camera positions/look_at's which I
noted on paper. Then I took the POV scene generated by Moray and modified the
parts to be animated using Chris Colefax' "Clock Modifier Macro". Somehow I
forgot to animate the fans at the end of the hall (don't ask how this could
happen, it just happened...).
In the last scene I used the clock modifier macro to blend between the initial
roof texture and a glass texture.
The "POV-Ray seeds" are not my idea. I've seen them somewhere else before, but I
don't know whose idea it was.