TITLE: Revenge is a dish best served cold.
NAME: Duncan Gray
COUNTRY: Great Britain
EMAIL: duncang@eclipse.co.uk
WEBPAGE: www.eclipse.co.uk/duncang
TOPIC: Alien Invasion
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: dg_alien.mpg
ZIPFILE: dg_alien.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1g

TOOLS USED: 
    MS-Visual Basic 6 (to convert a Pov generated
                                  BMP file into and INC file)
               Adobe Photoshop (for the image maps)
               CMPEG (Mpeg encoder)
               MS Media Player

CREATION TIME: 
    Approx 6-8 weeks part time.

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium P II 450 for development;
               Pentium P133 for batch rendering.

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 


    Mankind first invaded the moon in the late 60's.
    On the 6th of Feb 1971 mankind took his first shot.

    Revenge is a dish best served cold !

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

This movie is dedicated to Alan B. Shepard, Jr. who sadly, died on
July 21 1998 at the age of 74:

    The first American in Space, May 5, 1961.
    The oldest man to walk on the Moon, Feb 5, 1971.
    Unofficial golfing 'longest drive' record holder at 
                             'Miles and Miles', Feb 6, 1971.

A true pioneer without whom this movie would not have been possible.

Also, thanks again to the POV-Ray team - keep up the good work.


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
    Windows Media Player, 25fps

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


I deliberately wanted to steer clear of Spaceships and Explosions,
in an Alien Invasion round, there will be quite enough of them,
so there are no spaceships (um ... well, actually there is one.)
and the explosion count is kept down to none (well, nearly none)

But the spaceship and explosion are secondary to the story,
enter the little green bug: Inverse kinematics gone haywire!

The bug is the heart and soul of the animation, and it is in the bug
macro's that all the clever stuff happens. The versatility is
available because I have coded the bug-macro to automatically adjust
his knee and sholder angles to attempt to put his feet where requested
while allowing the bugs position and angle to be altered.

Walking the bug becomes more difficult as now the bugs position and
his foot positions must be separately calculated. The mesh-height
macro finishes off the bugs functionality - using this macro, and
an inc-file created by Visual Basic (source and EXE included but you
might have to go find some DLL's - VB Run-Time, etc.) the bug can be
made to walk over an uneven surface. The VB program basically converts
a Pov generated BMP file into a 2 dimensional array. The mesh_height
macro interpolates within this array to return the floor_height of
any X-Z co-ords in the area. A TGA height_field file is carefully
scaled to co-incide with the array values.

Anyway, hope you all enjoy it.