TITLE: Marching Soldiers
NAME: Kerry Johnson
COUNTRY: Australia
EMAIL: kerry.j@optusnet.com.au
TOPIC: Escape
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: soldiers.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Custom raytracer developed by me

TOOLS USED: 
    AVI2MPG1

CREATION TIME: 
    3 months!

HARDWARE USED: 
    Althon XP 1500+ and Althon XP 1800+, both with 256Mb RAM

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 


Just some soldiers marching along and "escaping" into a
door into another world.

I fully admit that its short, the story line is a bit light on and
its relevance to the topic is not that strong, but as I talk about
in the next section, I was more interested in writing the software.


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
    I use Media player - may look better with brightness
turned up on CRTs

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


I wanted to write some software to learn more about raytracing and
3D graphics, and investigate some effects not included in "standard"
software (ie free stuff like Povray).

Good points about it:

- General objects and effects - boxes, spheres, torii, cylinders, cones,
planes, true-type fonts, unions, merges, differences, intersections,
standard ambient-diffuse-specular shading model

- A cell outline algorithm to draw solid outlines similar to those
you see in traditional cell animation. You can see this effect
on the soldiers and the clown and the text. The cool thing about
this effect as opposed to the methods used to do this in polygon-based
rendering is that is is implemented as part of the object geometry
rather than as a post-processing technique. This means that it still
works when viewed in reflections and refractions (such as through
the snow-dome).

- Posterised textures - see the clown

- Billboarded pigments - see the soldiers

- I really learnt a lot, both about research techniques,
3D graphics, parser implemntation, compiler implementation,
math, blah blah.


Bad points:

- I spent to much time writing the software and not
enought making the movie

- Its written in Java, so its not the quickest
bit of software around think I will get into a bit
more real-time OpenGL graphics after this.