TITLE: 2harps
NAME: Grimbert Jerome
COUNTRY: France
EMAIL: jgrimbert@free.fr
WEBPAGE: http://jgrimbert.free.fr/
TOPIC: Speed
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: 2harps.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    povray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    VideoMach, BBMpeg (including Avi2mpg2 interface) and some sound
tools

CREATION TIME: 
    Far too much due to initial errors in scripts, change of design
and needed frame frequency!

HARDWARE USED: 
    180 MHz Pentium

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 


This animation shows a quick journey in a showroom where two automated
harp players are playing a fast music. There is no interest in music
played by automaton, even perfectly, hence, there is nobody in the 
showroom...


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
    WMPlayer as well as Hollywood+ card are ok here, sound
is nearly mandatory

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


I created the frames using the standard animation support in Povray.
With 3.5, I discovered the splines. It's look interesting at first,
but anything more than a linear spline is hard to master when a only
a few points are specified. That makes me rendered more than I would
expected that animation (and it takes so much time each times!!!).
But before rendering, the interesting part was to convert the music
in graphic position... There is two harps for two reasons: the 
original audio file was stereo and with up to four notes playing at the
same time (especially at the end), I was afraid of the arm management if
only one harp robot (with 4 arms) was used (avoiding collisions!).
Even with non-colloding arms per construction, handling the cinematics of
the finger/hand/elbow/shoulder was already 'interesting' (Yes, the fingers
touch the right strings at the right time!)
Despites the quick move of the robots (only a few frames between each notes,
even at 30 fps  originally, I planned at 24 fps, but it was missing details),
getting the feeling of the moving sound was difficult. So I added some boucing
spots on the wall behind the robots: whenever a string is hit, the spot is
at its lower position. I have tried other systems to hint the music, but none
were really fine (and the bouncing spot was the lattest to be ok...).
Just on the border of the scene are a few rotating spheres, which are not only
a cliche for rendering  I intended to have a checkered box, but the resulting
Mpeg
was just too horrible with them , but also provide the notion of relative speed
as well as a check that the movie is continuous.
Alas, this animation does not loop (even if it is nearly possible).
Thanks to the new 10MB limit, this animation reached the astromous time length
of 
84 seconds (and a little bit more) with sound, at a frame format of 512x384
(which become very interesting for the details such as the strings of the
harp).

Last word: The length of the strings of the Harp are precisely correct; 
Each octave is the double of another! (Which means that getting another octave
would have been uneasy).

Credit: The sound cames from a file name "prelude", I guess it's some classical
        music and that there shouldn't be any problem with it. It was an old mod
file,
        and I turned it into a wav file before encoding to Mpeg.
        The shape of the seats are from Fabien Mosen via the Web Pov object
repository.
        (I needed a seat which really was fast to render, that model was
available and fast!)
        All the remaining is mine!