TITLE: Wild West
NAME: Roland Ring
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: R.Ring@gmx.de
WEBPAGE: none
TOPIC: Robot
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: wildwest.mpg
ZIPFILE: wildwest.zip
RENDERER USED: 

   POV-Ray 3.1 for Windows

TOOLS USED: 

   Moray v3.1
   Paint Shop Pro for movie poster, title- and end screen
   CMPEG for encoding
   posttool for fadings (had no better tool to do this)

CREATION TIME: 

   about 2.5 month

HARDWARE USED: 

   450 MHz Celeron 128 MB, 500 MHz Pentium III 256 MB

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 

   This animation shows three robots, Robot 'C' gets angry and kills
   robot 'Q'. 'P' is a bit surprised. But don't worry, robots are 
   repairable.
   


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 

   Activemovie


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


   I created the robots using lots of CSGs in Moray. I used Moray's new 
   Inverse Kinematics function to limit the movements of the different axes.
   Moving the robot in IK-Mode was not possible, because the model turned 
   out to be to complex. Drawing a finger sometimes resulted in lifting a arm, 
   sometimes in bowing the spine or turning the hand. 
  
   I put the robots in different poses and used Moray's export function
   to create povray files of this poses. I used this povray files as keyframes.
   I wrote a C-program calculating the frames between the keyframes. This
   program reads an ini file, e.g.
      ani001.pov   // keyframe file 1
      20           // number of frames between 1 and 2
      ani002.pov   // keyframe file 2
      25           // number of frames between 2 and 3
      ani003.pov   // keyframe file 3
   The result of this ini file would be 48 pov files (3 keyframes+20+25), each 
   pov file representing one frame in the animation. The program checks the
   pov files for parameters changing from one keyframe to another. These values
   are read to memory and interpolated using a parabolic approach. The first
   pov file given in the inifile is used as template for creating the frames
   between the keyframes. It is 'filled' with the calculated values. I added
   the source code to the zip file, as well as the exe-file (16bit DOS Exe 
   created with MS Visual C 1.5), a sample ini file and two sample keyframes.
   
   The animation consists of 1500 frames produced with about 90 keyframes. I
would
   have liked to do some more fine tuning but ran out of time.