TITLE: Escape From Utopia (Part 1)

NAME: Neil Alexander
COUNTRY: Canada

EMAIL: stoker@sympatico.ca
WEBPAGE: www3.sympatico.ca/stoker

TOPIC: Pursuit/Escape
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: escape1.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    3D Studio MAX 3.1


TOOLS USED: 
    Character Studio, Blur Studio's Ink'n'Paint (public beta)


CREATION TIME: 
    3 months


HARDWARE USED: 
    dual Pentium II 350 MHz


ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 
    The setting is a futuristic military/industrial state
along the lines of Orwell's 1984. Our character disables the automated security
systems so that he may make his escape...


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
    none


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 
    I've been interested in
toon-shaded 3D animation for a while, so I thought I would try it for this
round. I thought that the solid colors would result in good mpeg compression,
so my original storyboard ran a little over 2 minutes. Unfortunately, the
compression was not as good as I'd hoped, so I had to cut a lot of my planned
scenes. Hence, the "Part 1" subtitle.

The look of this animation was partly inspired by MTV's Aeon Flux cartoon. I
wanted to go for a semi-realistic cartoon style. The Ink 'n Paint plugin from
Blur Studios provides the flat shading and black outlines through the MAX
renderer with special materials. Just about everything was rendered with the
Ink'n'Paint materials, except the sky at the start, which is procedural.

The characters are editable meshes with Meshsmooth applied, animated with Biped
and deformed with Physique. The main character's facial expressions are morphed
(with the Morpher modifier). I also used a Flex modifier on his hair to make it
bounce around a little.

The explosion is a Metaballs particle system, with self-spawning particles so
that the originating particles leave trails as they go. I animated the color
change over time, and used a couple of Wind space warps to control the motion
of the smoke from the original explosion. The flames and smoke behind it are a
separate particle system of spheres that grow and change color over time.

The rest of the modelling and animation was prety straight forward. As always, I
am happy to answer any specific questions by email.