TITLE: abduction NAME: Lou Bruce COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: lou_bruce@yahoo.com WEBPAGE: none at present TOPIC: Life COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. MPGFILE: abduct.mpg ZIPFILE: abduct.zip RENDERER USED: Blender 2.04 TOOLS USED: Blender 2.04, Amorphium for Text Modeling, SolidWorks 2000 for the house model, Microsoft Image Composer for textures, Blender 2.04 for Rendering, Audiorack32 for sound editing, DDClip Free for final composition and soundtrack production and finally AVI2MPG1 for conversion from raw AVI to MPG. CREATION TIME: 2 Months Final Rendering: 8 to 12 Hours HARDWARE USED: 233 MHz Pentium MMX ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: The tired little dog is just settling down for a good night's sleep, when the invasion force arrives. The three flying saucers have orders to abduct a human. Just after the tractor beams begin lifting the dog, the alien in command realizes that they have made a mistake. This is not a human. He aborts the abduction and the saucers continue on their way. However, the little dog is not very happy about the rude awakening. His reaction is to treat the saucers as he would any other annoyance. VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: Window Media Player DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: I began modeling the dog before I had a story in mind, he was my first attempt at a nurbs model in Blender. He is based on a sketch from the book "MAYA 2 Complete". The house began as a project in SolidWorks for a freind, he wanted a model of a lake house he was considering building. I decided it would make a good backdrop for this animation. After the topic was announced I knew what my story would be and started the animation. As the story progressed I realized that I needed the three settings to get the story across. The saucers are just lathed poly meshes with a haloed circle around the outer rim. The alien started as only a head, then I imported a copy of Drago from the previous project and cut off his head and tail. Then a grafted the alien head onto the Drago body. The animation for the dog and alien are all inverse kinematics, everything elese is forward kinematics. The process in blender is simply set the frame number, position the objects and the insert key frames for the objects. Then you can go back and edit the motion curves for final tweaking. The zip file contains the main scene with the dog, house and saucers. The Archive file contains the Blender file DRAGOTITLE.blend which is the title shot only. For those of you interested in opening the Blender file, Blender is available as a freeware download at www.blender.nl.