TITLE: Revenge of the Blob
NAME: Richard Webster
COUNTRY: England
EMAIL: irtc_mail@yahoo.co.uk
TOPIC: Evolution
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: blob.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    CSound, TMPGEncode
RENDER TIME: 19hrs

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD Duron 1.1GHz 1GB

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 


 An experiment in natural selection.



VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 


 It has a stereo soundtrack.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


 All frames were rendered at 320x240 with anti-aliasing.

 Modelling is done with POV-Ray primitives. The rain is a plane
 with a transparent pattern being moved in front of the camera.

 Green/red lighting is done using a lighting macro which takes
 a colour as an argument. The colour is found by interpolating
 between the green, red and normal light colours.

 The figure model is a simple skeleton with a pose controlled
 by a set of joint angles. Making each angle oscillate with time
 gives a walk or run cycle. Interpolating between two sets of
 angles gives a transition between two cycles.

 Each of the cells viewed through the microscope is moving with
 its own random walk. When they 'divide', new cells are created
 at the positions of existing cells and then wander off.

 The electrical discharges are done with a line of of points,
 each on its own random walk, but constrained by the points on
 either side. The points are connected with white spheres and
 cylinders with ambient 1.

 The Blob is done using a POV-Ray blob with 1000 spheres. The
 movement comes from a time-stepping method of finding forces on
 the spheres and then moving them to their new positions. If two
 spheres are too close together they feel a force pushing them
 apart and if they are too far apart they feel a force pulling
 them together. They also feel a force from the ground. Extra
 forces are applied to make the blob 'act'. The blob routine is
 coded in C for speed and, for each frame, writes an include file
 containing the blob and then runs POV-Ray to produce the scene
 with figures.
 
 The soundtrack was done using the free audio renderer CSound
 which reads a text file describing 'instruments' and a score
 and renders an output wav file. Letting POV-Ray write lines in
 the CSound input file everytime it detects an event such as a
 collision would be a way of having POV-Ray write its own
 soundtrack. I had a plan to add footstep sounds this way, but
 ran out of time.
 
 The images and soundtrack were combined in the free mpeg encoder
 TMPGEncode.