TITLE: Shape Races
NAME: Jason Smith
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: jps6860@yahoo.com
WEBPAGE: http://home.earthlink.net/~jtsmith7
TOPIC: Speed
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: js_shprc.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray 3.3, Moray Animation Plug-In, CMPEG, Adobe PhotoDeluxe, MS
Paint

CREATION TIME: 
    about 7 hours total render time

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon 600Mhz

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 


Shape Races
staring (in alphabetical order):  
Cone, Cube, Cylinder, and Sphere

The animation is self explanatory.  Four shapes compete in a 
race, but one seems to be having a bit of a problem.



VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
    none

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


All modeling and animation setup was done in Moray.  My goal was 
to keep all of the objects simple and use their animations to 
give them depth and personality.  All of the objects are made 
from basic shapes with simple color textures.  A single area
light lights the scene from above.

Unfortunately with the holidays, I didn't get enough time to spend 
on the animations as I would have liked.  The audience seemed to
suffer the most from my lack of time.  I guess you could argue 
that they are just really intent on the events.

To create the animation I had the animation plug-in output a file
for each frame and then used CMPEG to join everything together.
This also allowed me to work on each shot individually instead of 
trying to get everything right the first time.

I also did a bit of post processing on some of the images.  I created 
the text in a separate image and pasted it into the frames that 
required it.  I would have liked to include the text into the actual
render.  I played around with a 'speech bubble' system for displaying
text but I didn't have time to fully implement it.  The fades between 
shots were also done through post processing.  It was done by merging 
the two images and setting their transparency.

I also have a list of improvements I would have like to have made if I 
had the time.  Animating the crowd would be my first priority.  The
horizon and sky also make it on my list.  The horizon needs something 
to break it up a bit, maybe a few houses or trees.  The sky could also 
use a few clouds.