TITLE: Brass and Steel NAME: Daniel Dresser COUNTRY: Canada EMAIL: dresserd@techie.com TOPIC: Unnecessarily Complicated Devices COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. MPGFILE: ddbrass.mpg ZIPFILE: ddbrass.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1 TOOLS USED: pencil and paper for rough work K'nex for building model of blades interlocking Bumper for viewing test renders IrfanView for image conversion cmpeg for mpeg encoding CREATION TIME: Design took most of my time not wasted on English essays for the last couple of months. Render time was about 50 hrs. (not counting all the segment I messed up and had to redo) HARDWARE USED: Athlon 1200 ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: Many of the devices we use in our everyday life are overly complex, it's just that we don't notice. The challenge for this contest is to make a device which shows it's complexity. I started with the idea of massive whirling interlocking blades, and then started thinking about what I could use them for. I quite like the purpose I found. I had some fun with the gearing, but in the end, I think it could actually work if all the materials were 20 times as strong as reality. (Any machinists out there who want to try it?) The inspiration for this device comes partially from the D'ni civilization created by Cyan (Myst/Riven computer games). This is not traditional D'ni machinery, but although it lacks ornamentation, it shows the D'ni values of elegantly exposed workings, and perfect craftsmanship. The ideal setting for this rendering would be a massive stone cathedral, but I don't have time to design one. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: Straight POV-Ray code. Lots of math. A lot of the math actually isn't quite right, but I doubt if it is noticeable in the final mpeg. I apologize for how sloppy my source files are. Almost everything is just CSG of boxes, cylinders, spheres and prisms, with the odd lathe or blob for a fire. I relied extensively on while loops. All the movements are defined by equations - I actually found a use for all the trig they teach at school. What gave me the most grief was getting it encoded into mpeg. I'm still not ecstatic about final result, but at the beginning I was using avi2mpg, I just couldn't get it to output an acceptable quality in a reasonable amount of space. Even without the knowledge of the advanced features, cmpeg gave me about 2000% better quality. This was where the image converter came in - I had already rendered for 30 hours into bitmap, so I had to convert the whole thing to targa.