TITLE: A Clockwork Kettle
NAME: Jhem Murray
COUNTRY: United Kingdom/ Scotland
EMAIL: jhem_m@hotmail.com
WEBPAGE: www.jhem.co.uk (currently down)
TOPIC: Unnecessarily Complicated Devices
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: c_kettle.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    3DS Default Scanline Renderer

TOOLS USED: 
    3DS MAX, Adobe Premiere, LSX-MPEG Encoder

CREATION TIME: 
    212 hrs

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD Athlon 1.2 GHz with 384 MB RAM


ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 


The animation starts off in the character's bedroom, early in the morning. The
alarm clock 
starts ringing at 9 am, the vibration of the clock soon causes it to release the
beam it was 
carefully balanced on, and this triggers off a series of other reactions!


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 


Animation can be viewed with the standard Windows Media Player, note that the
resolution is
400x300


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


The animation involved a lot of tricky physical dynamics that had to be dealt
with first. The ringing alarm clock was a model i built myself in 3D Studio
MAX, when the alarm clock releases the beam you'll notice that it pulls down
another beam because they are attached by a piece of string. The string was
hand animated, i simply used the line tool and then animated the individual
vertexes. I had to play about a while before the string looked satisfactory.
Next, we see the glass ball/marble bouncing down a slide. This was also hand
animated, I didn't use any dynamics systems or scripts. The tricky part was the
dominos, this took a while to sort out. Basically, the animation for one domino
is cloned multiple times which gives the effect on screen. The first few
dominos were animated differently, because i needed to give an impression of
inertia before they start to topple. Particle animation was used for flame on
the lighter car object, this was just a matter of using MAX's super spray
particle system. Next, a small anvil is released when the string snaps, again,
the string was animated by hand using the line tool and then animating the
individual vertexes. A match attached to the see-saw is lit and then it moves
onto light the rocket. The rocket shoots upwards, a particle system was used to
create the burning tail of the rocket. You'll notice the rocket squashes
sightly before it spins out of control, i simply used the bend modifier here to
create the collision effect. The action man toy then slides down the wire and
bumps into a pillar with a ball on top. The ball moves very slowly to give an
impression of weight. The ball then falls on a second see-saw which flicks the
switch on the kettle. The animation uses some clever camera tricks such as
motion blur, although this takes around 4 times as long to render! Most objects
in the animation which move fast have an object motion blur applied to them.
The light you can see coming through the window at the start is volumetric
lighting, and ray-traced omni lights (a total of 5) are used to light the room.
Most of the textures have a bump and specular map applied to them. The
animation was rendered in 5 sections, which were later put together in
premiere. LSX-MPEG encoder was used to convert from avi>mpg.