TITLE: The Tower
NAME: Antoine Valentim
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: bumblebee@globalserve.net
WEBPAGE: http://web.globalserve.net/~bumblebee/ecclesia/ecclesia.htm
TOPIC: Construction
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: tower.mpg
RENDERER USED: 

    POV-Ray 3.5 beta 6


TOOLS USED: 

    pjBmp2Avi, Avi2Mpg2, IrfanView, Gimp (opening credits, "movie poster"),
Rune's easyblob macro

RENDER TIME: 
    a few days


HARDWARE USED: 

    Celeron 433

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

A creature builds a tower from a pile of blocks.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I had originally intended to do something more elaborate (and I did some
modelling on various objects), but I lost enthusiasm for my original idea.

So, with time running out, I decided to do something nice and simple.  Perhaps
this was a good idea, as it's my first real animation...  I kept the modelling
on a "cartoony" level, and so I didn't get bogged down in trying to achieve
photorealism.

In any case, most of my time was spent modelling the creature.  It's made
entirely of blobs (using Rune's easyblob macro).  I also spent quite some time
figuring out how to make the creature the run and walk.  I used the clock value
to determine the phase of the walk or run cycles, and figured out what trig
functions would describe the rotations of the limbs I needed.  The walking was
the hard part, as it involved a sawtooth wave, which I simulated with a sum of
sine waves.

The trees are spheres on cylinders (positioned with the trace function), the
land is a heightfield and a plane, and the bricks are round_boxes.

The "opening credits" were done in GIMP.