TITLE: Life & Liberty
NAME: Tim King
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: timk@jtse.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.jtse.com/
TOPIC: Life
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: liberty.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Animation Master 99 v7.1

TOOLS USED: 
    Animation Master 99, Paint Shop Pro, Axogon Composer, AVI2MPG

CREATION TIME: 
    500 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD K6-2 400

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 


Life is more than just biological mechanics. What makes life? And
what are the implications of life? Science fiction authors, ever
since their genre was invented, have been asking these questions
by creating non-human creatures and living machines to represent
the human condition.

In Life & Liberty, two play-dough cut-outs, being blessed with
the biological mechanics of life, find themselves deeply in love.
And faced with a fleeting opportunity to choose their own destiny,
they must decide between the comfortable existence they've always
known and a risky chance for a new life.

I will be publishing a slightly longer version of this animation,
enhanced with sound, by April 30, 2000. Stay tuned to my website
for details. http://www.jtse.com/


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 


Windows Media Player v6 on Windows 95 and Windows 98, or with
Xtheater on Linux.

If your monitor's gamma is too low, parts of the animation may
look dark. It's not the end of the world, but for optimum results
you want correct gamma. Many video cards can compensate for
monitor gamma. (Look in your Windows Display Control Panel. Under
Linux, monitor gamma is specified in your X configuration.)
Alternatively, if it does look a little dark, adjusting the
monitor's brightness control a little may produce better, though
not ideal, results.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


All of the models, materials, and textures inside the room are
original. The table is made of a completely custom material, as
are the wooden window parts. Textures for Dough Boy and Dough Girl,
for the People Dough canister label, and for the nicks and scratches
in the table were created with Paint Shop Pro. The window design is
the same as that of my living room window.

I used Rodger Reynolds' tree kit  1  and sunny sky material  2  in
the outside view. But the leaves and bark are original materials. For
the ground material, I started with Brian Prince's "Synthesis"
terrain material  3  and heavily modified it to be appropriate to
the scale I needed.

For the lighting setup, I used two suns, one for the outside objects
and one for the inside. The outside sun has soft-shadows, while the
inside one doesn't. Then I added lights to simulate radiosity from
the walls of the room, from the table, and from the outside sky.

There were very few tricks to the animation. I used no stock actions.
The character setup does IK from the hands and feet. Everything else
is FK. The rest of it was just hard work: setting keyframes and ease
frames and setting channel interpolation between them all. Just about
all character animation is done in actions, as opposed to animating
directly in the choreography.

I used three cameras. Frames from the three cameras were rendered to
TGA, and combined with text and effects using Axogon Composer  4 .
I used Paint Shop pro for the captions and titles. I outputted to
uncompressed AVI and used AVI2MPG to generate the final MPEG.

 1  http://www.netcore.ca/~reynolds/text/trees.htm

 2  http://www.netcore.ca/~reynolds/text/skytest.htm

 3  http://www.enol.com/~bprince/StreamTerrain.zip
    Brian's other artwork, including "Synthesis," can be seen at his
    homepage: http://www.enol.com/~bprince/

 4  http://www.axogon.com/

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