TITLE: Electricity
NAME: Maarten Hofman
COUNTRY: USA (Originally the Netherlands)
EMAIL: maarten_hofman@hotmail.com
WEBPAGE: http://people.zeelandnet.nl/whhofman/jen
TOPIC: Journey
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: electric.mpg
ZIPFILE: electric.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 

* Adobe Photoshop 6.0 (create the title image, height fields, editing
television
                       picture)
* WinZip (to create the zip file)
* CMPEG (to create the MPEG file, with a home made IPB.CTL file)
* PaperPort (to scan the picture for the television)


CREATION TIME: 
    Several months of work, actual rendering/compressing 11 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium IV 1.8 GHz


ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 

It is probably best to first view the animation, and then refer to this text
for
any details.

The animation tries to show the journey of electricity. It starts at a dam of a
hydro plant which opens and causes water to flow. The
water turns a turbine, and this causes the light of the building to turn on.
After the lights turn on the door opens to let the camera in, which moves to
see
the turbine turning. Then a little flash indicates the electricity that goes
into the power net, and the camera follows it through the window, where it
moves
into a substation to be transformed to a higher voltage (to reduce losses while
transporting it over long distances). It then moves towards the power pylon,
and
from power pylon to power pylon (and the camera moves with it) passing a 
maintainance road. There are red and white balls attached to the wires, to warn
low flying planes that they are there (the free standing power pylons are also
painted red and white to make them more visible). After a while it reaches
another substation, where the voltage is lowered again (for part of the wires,
half of the generated electricity goes to the east, using a different kind of
pylons). From this substation wooden poles bring the electricity over a 
mountain to a valley (where there is a T-branch in some of the rough roads,
with
a sign post). Once it reaches the house it is again transformed to a lower
voltage, and then the flash moves to the house (though the wires continue to
the west with more wooden poles). Next to the house is a Suzuki Vitara (a
vehicle
like that is needed for roads like this). Behind the house is a small piece of
tarmac, but this quickly changes into rougher roads anyway. The flash moves
into
the meter, and then the light turns on in the house. The camera moves with the
flash into the house, and the breaker box opens. The camera then follows the
flash to the television, where the red stand-by LED turns on. Then the
television
turns on, and shows another journey: that of a cycling cat.

Note that most of the landscape is based on the landscape of the sultanate of 
Oman, except for the hydro plant, which would not really work in a country
where
it rains only very rarely (and all dams are just there to protect the land from
these torrents of rain). The hydro plant is based on one in Poland. The trace 
includes three different power pylons and two different types of substations.
Not everything programmed is visible in the raytrace, if desired, you can
download the source files and explore other areas of the map (some recommended
view points are available in the comments). The house and its surroundings are
based on a USA house (ranch style).


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 

I like programming all the objects myself in the POVRAY scene language, which I
did again here. I managed to keep everything in one set of source files, i.e.
one run generates the entire sequence. Here is a list of the things I
encountered and how I solved them:

* For my stills I developed a very nice way to do water (after I followed
  Christoph's excellent internet course about it) but unfortunately this type
  of water takes hours per image, so I had to cut some corners to make it fast
  enough for the animation to complete within reasonable time. I managed to
  create a simpler, but still reasonably realistic version of water, which you
  see in the animation.
* I needed quite some math to get all the beams aligned in the power pylons
  (they are all based on pylons I saw in real life).
* Originally I wanted to have the flash only be visible occasionally, but
  after some experimentation I discovered that this would only work if I added
  a sound with it, to focus attention towards it. As sound is currently not 
  used in judging animations, I decided to keep it visible at all times.
* Because some of the mountains have interesting ridges, some of the camera
  movements are non-linear (i.e. quadratic).
* Putting the roads in was tricky, but I eventually just took my heightfield
  and made everything that was not road black, and raised it slightly above
  the other heightfield in a different colour. This created a nice dusty
  road effect.
* The bear is the only object in the trace that I made earlier, and was my
  first attempt at using blobs.
* This is the first animation where I quickly run out of memory. I had to
  tweak the IPB.CTL file of CMPEG in order to fit the animation in the 
  required 10MB. Currently quality setting is I:4, P:5 and B:12. I learned
  a lot about MPEG I compression this way.

For some reason I prefer sharp shadows, despite them being less realistic. I 
guess it is just the way I raytrace.