TITLE: Alarm Clock NAME: Ian Print COUNTRY: England EMAIL: ian@escape-from-reality.co.uk WEBPAGE: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/tirain/ TOPIC: Unnecessarily Complicated Devices COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. MPGFILE: ip_alarm.mpg RENDERER USED: Blender 2.23 and 2.20 TOOLS USED: Digital camera (to get textures), Paintshop Pro 4.15 SE (for editing textures), Studio DC10+ 1.06 (for putting sound track together), SoundProbe2 (for recording and editing sounds), TMPGEnc 12a (to encode the MPEG) CREATION TIME: About 8 hours to render, countless hours to create, countless more hours trying to stop windows falling to pieces. HARDWARE USED: 466 MHz Celeron, 384 MB. ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: It's an alarm clock. Of course it only works on sunny days, but nothing's perfect is it? In case you couldn't figure out what was going on in any part of the animation, here's the sequence of events... The magifying glass concentrates the sun's rays onto the string. The string burns and snaps. This releases a plate which has been held down on a spring by the string (via some pulleys). The plate gets pushed up by the spring (but is glued on, so it doesn't fly off and break). The apple resting on the plate is thrown into the air and hits the ruler. The ruler is slotted through a piece of dowel and pivots when hit by the apple. The ruler hits the handle of a child's spade, which is pivoting on a cricket stump. The end of the spade hits a set-square which is pivoting on an iron bar. This releases the string of a bow and arrow. The arrow (with a sucker on the end) hits a target which is attached to a metal rod, supported by two metal bars with loops. The metal rod slides along through the loops and pushes a rubber glove attached to the other end onto the switch of a clockwork mouse. The clockwork mouse starts up and causes the vinyl record it is resting on to turn. (The record rests on a pencil, supported by flower pots, supported by carboard boxes, and the mouse is attached to the wall by another metal bar). There are two metal nuts dangling on pieces of string from the record. As the record turns faster the nuts fly outward and eventually one of them hits the pair of scissors, causing them to close. The scissors cut the string holding up a mallet, which pivots on a metal bar (there's a lot of metal bars in this). The mallet swings down and hits a cricket ball balanced on a golf tee (which you probably wouldn't notice unless you freeze the animation). The cricket ball rolls down a drainpipe and hits a cricket bat. The bat is wedged into the head of a broom which is attached to the ceiling by a hinge. This keeps the bat upright and stops the broom from moving. When the cricket ball hits the bat, the bat falls down and releases the broom which swings back and forth. The two fish nailed to the ends of the broom head slap the sleeper repeatedly in the face. While this slapping is going on the cricket bat falls and hits one end of a bread knife which is balanced on a rolling pin with an orange on the other end. The orange is catapulted into the air and lands in a waste paper bin attached via pieces of string to a coathanger. As the orange in the bin pulls one end of the coathanger down the other end pivots up pulling another string, via pulleys, attached to a coffee mug. The mug tips up releasing marbles into a funnel. The marbles drop from the funnel onto a saucepan lid making a loud clanging noise, thus helping the sleeper to awake (in case the fish slapping isn't enough). DEDICATION: This is dedicated to my wife, Rhoda - who is still waiting for me to finish the bathroom. VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: Windows media player DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: All the modelling, animation, and titling was done in Blender. I created all the objects myself, except for the head which was exported from the free version of Poser 3 on a cover magazine. I reshaped it in Blender, added a UV map of my (slightly rehashed) face and animated it with relative vertex keys. I created nearly all the textures from photos taken with a digital camera, but one or two things I couldn't find lying around the house and had to resort to the internet. The smoke from the string was done with particles, using the procedural texture "marble" in the 8th channel in order to vary the direction of the smoke from a straight line. I also animated the offset of the marble using an empty in order to shake the smoke about a bit. The magnifying glass texture was done using the refraction plug-in made by Eeshlo. (Blender is not a ray tracer, and cannot do real refraction or reflection - it has to be faked). The dropping marbles are done with 3 particle emitters with dupliverted spheres to generated marbles instead of particle halos. One emits from inside the cup into the funnel, where they vanish. The second emits from the bottom of the funnel onto the pan lid, where they again vanish just before hitting the pan. The third emits upwards from the pan lid, with plenty of randomness added for scatter. I had some major problems with Windows towards the end of this project. I have two versions of it on two disks, one very flakey (screwed up registry and all sorts). The good version I managed to mangle by restoring from a backup which failed to work. Then neither did the previous backup (not enough memory to start windows my foot! Since when did Win98 need more than 384MB to start up?!) Then I tried my old backups done by Microsoft backup and it said half the files on them were corrupted when trying to restore it. Arrgh! So I had to finish it off using the flakey windows, which of course started getting more and more problems the closer I got to finishing - registry errors, reboots, GPFs everywhere. Gah. I *hate* windows sometimes! Sorry about all that whinging but I just had to get it off my chest!