EMAIL: gsingelm@t-online.de
NAME: Gerald P. Singelmann
TOPIC: Adventure
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Duckyıs Bg Adventure
COUNTRY: Germany
WEBPAGE:
RENDERER USED: Ray Dream Studio
TOOLS USED: Ray Dream Studio, Premiere, Photoshop, movie2MPEG
CREATION TIME: looooong (does anyone actually count the hours?)
HARDWARE USED: Mac G4/400
VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: as usual with MPEGs mixed on my mac, some scenes might be too dark. i still have found no good way to prevent this
ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: the biggest adventures of all: the ones you have as a child...

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:
i could not resist the beginning <smile> ... the white circles are actually 3D objects with a very high glow setting. (i find it easier animating in ray dream than in any other (unknown) programm)
i spent the first 4-7 weeks trying to get water and grass right. the grass is made using the furrific extension to ray dream. some days i was not too systematic and afterwards could not remember how the rather good results were reached. bugger. how do you organize your experiments, folks?
the duck is my first succesful attempt at using the not-exactly-professional-standard mesh editor of ray dream. at last i believe that you *can* do things in there. (the spline editor on the other hand is fun)
the collision detection of ray dream is too inferior to prevent the water growing through the leaf under the frog. i had to retouch frame by frame in photoshop.
there is no motion blur in ray dream, so the flight was single-frame-edited as well.
i found my web-cam an invaluable help in getting the timing right: how fast do you move when you get startled? how fast should the wings move when a duck is in a hurry? and so on. 60 bucks well spent.
after i was almost finished (yesterday ;) i noticed, that the ³message² of the film is not what i intended. so i had to put in the last, small render. i would have liked to elaborate, but i still think it somehow works.

this was fun, again. 
thanks for the opportunity (and the deadline / pressure) to be creative and finish something 
I am looking forward to see what you other guys come up with :)