TITLE: Old Mr Robot and his Lawn-mower
NAME: Florian Siegmund
COUNTRY: Austria
EMAIL: hobbes-kuscheltiger@gmx.at
TOPIC: Unnecessarily Complicated Devices
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: oldmrr.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    MegaPov 0.7

TOOLS USED: 
    aviedit, avi2mpg1, Corel Photo Paint 6.0

CREATION TIME: 
    about six weeks

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD Athlon 1400 Mhz

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 


A robot sits in a lawn-mower and cuts the grass - and he does it very carefully.
In front of the lawn-mower there's a claw arm which cuts one grass blade after
the other, but not automatically... for every single movement of the claw arm
the robot has got a leaver.

After a grass blade has been cut, it is given into a drawer that is part of the
lawn-mower. Furthermore the lawn-mower has got a few buttons to start its
engine and to turn two sprayers on and off. It is clear that the robot cannot
cut all the grass within one day, at the end of the animation you can see him
working in the moonlight; so there's an open ending and you never will get to
know when he will finish...



VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
    I guess that a screen brightness of about 45 to 50
percent is best to view the animation (if you use lower values, it is difficult
to see the background image at the beginning)


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


At first I modeled the robot and the lawn-mower in MegaPov. To get smooth edges
I used superellipsoids in many cases, the robot's head is a good example. Then
I wrote the algorithms for the movements. At the same time I modeled the
environment, which only consists of simple objects. The houses are boxes and
the grass blades are smooth triangles, for example. Despite this they look
good, don't they?

The backgrounds were first rendered in MegaPov and then were projected onto the
sky sphere as image maps to save a lot of time. I used 72 frames per second at
first and then wrote a file in MegaPov to average three frames into one to get
a simple kind of motion blurring. I had written a particle include file some
time before and I used it to simulate water droplets. The rainbow is a simple
projection effect of a polarical pattern onto the droplets, with the camera
location as its center.

And I used my own sine spline curves for the movement of the camera and other
objects, because other types of splines did not work as I wanted them to.

I also used focal blur as a type of post-processing in MegaPov to reduce noise
in the background (in all parts of the animation where you can see grass) and
to give the animation a more realistic look.

Finally I used the lens flares include files by Chris Cholefax, but I changed
one of them a little bit, because I thought that the locations of the spots
were not calculated correctly (I don't know whether I'm right, but I found that
it looked better after the changes).

I have given no source files, because I have no acess to the Internet at home
and I forgot to copy them onto my dikettes :) but if somone wants to have
special parts or all of them, he only needs to send me an email.