TITLE: A Thorny Tail NAME: Steve Schaneville COUNTRY: USA (Louisiana) EMAIL: schaneville@hotmail.com TOPIC: Adventure COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. MPGFILE: thorny.mpg ZIPFILE: thorny.zip RENDERER USED: ------------- Mental Ray 3.1 TOOLS USED: ---------- Softimage|XSI 2.01 Photoshop avi2mpg CREATION TIME: ------------- 1 month (a few hours) -- idea development 1 month (30 hours?) -- modeling and texturing 1 month (50 hours?) -- animating 3 days (72 hours?) -- rendering 3 hours -- compositing HARDWARE USED: ------------- Athlon 1700+ XP (256 MB) -- modeling, texturing, animating, and rendering Dual Pentium 450 (192 MB) -- rendering ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: --------------------- A snake gets frustrated with a cactus when he bumps the cactus while waking up. Little does he know, the cactus doesn't care much for his taunting... VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: ----------------------- Take note, there is a problem with the shadows, but it is too late for me to re-render now. There are also a few other glitches that you'll notice... sorry 'bout that. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: --------------------------------------------- I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to use Softimage|XSI, a full blown professional animation package. It was a real treat, and I learned tons about animation in general. Every model and texture was created specifically for this animation. All textures were painted from scratch in photoshop, except for the landscape ground and sky textures, which were taken from random pictures off the web and edited as needed. Snake ----- Modeling: the snake is made of subdivision surfaces. The thorns at the end of the animation were created with XSI's hair module. Texturing: 3 color maps for the color 2 bump maps for the scales 1 specular map for the scales Animating: the snake is deformed by a spline. The spline is controlled by 6 control cubes along the length of the snake. The cubes are attached to 3 spline points each, so that moving and rotating the control cubes controls that general location of the snake. In addition, the snake's head is deformed by 2 skeleton bones. The bones are linked to several sliders allowing for various rotations of the head and for opening and closing the mouth. Regular key-framing was used on all controls. Cactus ------ Modeling: the cactus' surface is made of subdivision surfaces, and is smooth (i.e. does not include the "ripples" seen in the animation). The ripples were created by painting a displacement map in photoshop and wrapping it around the cactus. The thorns that cover the cactus are made from the XSI hair module. Texturing: 1 displacement map for the cactus "ripples". 2 procedural textures for the cactus surface. 1 procedural texture for the thorns. Animating: the cactus' arms are each deformed by a skeleton chain. The main truck is deformed very similarly to the way the snake is controlled, but there is only one control cube at the top of the cactus and the bottom is fixed to the ground. Regular key-framing was used on all controls. Clock ----- Modeling: made of booleans and primatives. Texturing: several straight colors were applied to the various clock components, and a picture of a pocket watch was applied to the clock face. Animating: keyframing was used for the clock movement and the ringing bell. Expressions applied to the clock's rotation were used to make the clock shake while it is ringing. Environment ----------- Modeling: straight polygonal modeling was used for mountain and rock elements. The main ground was deformed with a displacement weight map. The sky is a simple sphere with the normals pointing inward. Texturing: 1 color map for each element was used. 1 bump map for each element was used, but bump map rendering was turned off for the final render because it wasn't going to finish before the deadline. Animating: No animation... only camera movement. Notes: I really would have liked to have added some plants and grassy areas to this animation, but simply ran out of time. Compositing ----------- Instead of rendering out everything in a single swoop, I opted to render out all 3000 frames in 5 passes (for a total of 15000 files). 4 passes included single objects: 1) the snake only, 2) the cactus only, 3) the environment, and 4) the clock only. The fifth pass was a shadows-only pass for all objects. I then composited them back together with the XSI internal compositer. The output in the end is identical to what the renderer would have output if it was done all at once, with two exceptions: 1) the shadow pass was blurred before compositing, giving psuedo soft shadows without having to use area lights (saving time), and 2) to do the transitional "wipe" near the end of the animation. The other reason I rendered in passes is because it helps speed up render times... the renderer doesn't have so much information to deal with all at one time, and my computer didn't have enough memory to handle all the polygons at once anyway. Zip File -------- The zip file includes the scene file created in XSI (version 2.01) and all picture files created in photoshop (some of the photoshop files are in jpg format rather than psd format to help save space).