TITLE: The Early Fly gets the Frog Sandwich
NAME: H.E. Day
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: PovRayGuy@aol.com
WEBPAGE: http://heday.freeservers.com
TOPIC: Alien Invasion
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: earlyfly.mpg
ZIPFILE: earlyfly.zip
RENDERER USED: 

    MegaPov+ 0.32     
    

TOOLS USED: 

    Adobe Photoshop 4.01, Spatch, DDClip, Windows Sound Recorder, Fast Movie
Processor, CoolEdit (for removing static from recordings), AVI2MPG  

RENDER TIME: 
     about 4 days 


HARDWARE USED: 

    Pentium 200Mhz MMX 32MB RAM


ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 

This is an animation about Neville Hogwire, his frog sandwich, and a bunch of
flies.  Watch it. You'll laugh, gag, and wonder.
Well, I did anyway.   

SLIGHT STORY NOTE:
The "early fly" lands, runs around a bit, and takes off before the other flies
land on the sandwich.  He then lands after the cake has been turned back into a
frog sandwich.  There, that'll help you see *how* the early fly got the frog
sandwich.  
And in case you didn't get it, the "Alien Invasion" is the 200+ flies landing on
the frog sandwich. 

There's an image. :)    


COOL THING IN THIS ANIMATION:
Hogwire breathes. Watch, you'll see it.
Cool huh?
 

HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:
The wizard is a bunch of blobs animated by splines, (in fact, that's pretty much
how everything was animated...)  The sandwich is a bunch of blobs and prisms,
while the plate and cup were made in Spatch.
The office is a bunce of superellipsoid isosurfaces, with variable textures. 
The desk is a height field. The papers are generated by a macro I made.  The
flys are simple unions of a sphere and two transparent discs that are randomly
rotated.   
Here's an example of the texture used on the birthday cake (and all cartoonish
objects).

texture {
pigment {
slope <1/2,-1/8,-1> 
color_map {
 .25 rgb <1,.75,.875> 
 .3  rgb <1,.625,.75> 
 .5  rgb <1,.625,.75>       
 .55 rgb <1,.5,.625>        
 .75 rgb <1,.5,.625> 
 .8  rgb <1,.25,.5> 
}  
}
finish {ambient .875 diffuse 0 brilliance 0}     
}

As you can see, it uses the slope pigment pattern to make a nice gradiented
shading pattern. 

I used DDClip to help me lip-sync Hogwire's mouth to the audio. One example:
The animation has 100 frames, at a rate of 24 fps.  Go into DDClip, open the
sound file you wish to lip-sync, and set the frame rate to 24. 
Zoom in to 2-3 frames per inch.  Now, go frame-by frame and input data,
according to the loudness of the sound, into a spline like this:

#declare Spline1 = //Mouth (It doesn't make any blooming sense!)
spline {
cubic_spline   
058,0       
059,1/2       
060,1/2
061,1/4
062,1/4  
064,1/2   
065,1/3   
066,1/3    
067,1/3      
068,1/6      
069,1/6   
070,0 
072,3/4
073,1/4    
075,1/3       
078,1/5     
081,1/3  
083,1/2 
085,1/3  
086,1/7      
089,1/7    
090,1/3    
093,1/5
094,1/4 
096,1/5
100,0
}

Then bring it to a declared variable like so:
#declare MouthOpen = 0+Spline1(clock*100).x //This assumes the clock goes from
0-1

The model you want to have talk should require a MouthOpen variable to be
declared. This variable will open the mouth in sync with the sound.  Render the
anim out using +kff100. 
Behold! A talking whatever. :)    

And, yes, that is my voice.
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After the helium.

   

EXTRA THANKS TO:
Chris Huff, who probably worked his butt off to get MP+ .32 out in time for me
to finish the anim. (And with school in session! Wow!)
Nathan Kopp, who continues to do great work on MegaPov.
Whoever created the slope pattern. 
Thanks!

IN FINISHING:
Enjoy the animation, and please let me know what you think, either by e-mail or
commenting.   
Thanks again! 


H.E. Day
<>< 

2:44 PM
October 5, 2000 



P.S. To get DDClip, do a search for DDClip online.  You'll find it, I'm sure.