EMAIL: jh@cfjh.de NAME: Jürgen Hochwald TOPIC: The End Of COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: The End Of COUNTRY: Germany WEBPAGE: www.cfjh.de RENDERER USED: Povray 3.5 for Linux TOOLS USED: Kate (all source code editing) xv (viewing the single images) mpeg_encode (for mpeg creation) mpeg_play (viewing) CREATION TIME: 2 Month (rendering 3 weeks) HARDWARE USED: Athlon 650 MHz VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: tested with mpeg_play and xmms view with 25 fps ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: During the exploration of an unkown planet the shuttle touches down after a crash of the navigation computer. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: All objects are generated with pure povray code and macros. I've reused some objects from my first anim (fly_esc). Both the mothership and the shuttles have 'interior', and here are some scenes made. The images on the monitors are not image maps. All stuff is generated by Pov-objects and then scaled to be nearly flat. The humans are created from matices, one for each component x,y,z and normals. The I've some macros to transform theese matrices. Body, head, arms and legs are created with their own matrices, then all objects are tranformed and finally connected to get a solid body. The last step is to calculate the surface normals and write smooth triangle objects to make the human visible. Currently all humans are using the same matices, only the textures are different. The hair is also done by a matrix-based macro. The matrix gives the shape, the macro calculates the normals and makes the (single) hair vertically to the local normal. A random function placed lots of single hairs over the full matrix. The animations are done by an enhanced keyframe macro. The macro uses a time index, the value for the variable and a function. These parameters are stored in an array, the macro uses now the function to connect two points. Possible connect-funstions are 'linear', 'sin', 'sin neg', 'doudble S' and 0.5'linear'+0.5'double S'. Also a spline interpolation (parametric, cubic) is possible. All animations are done with Povray's internal animation system. I used the clock value in seconds (clock=0 means 0 sec, clock=3 means 3 seconds). Most animations steps are done on hole seconds. Rendered with 25 fps, the shots are changing von x*25 frames. Now I've more than 12000 lines of source code to make the anim, with 5500 lines the humans are the biggest part. All the making was very time critical. The pure rendering needed more than 20 days at 24 hrd/day to render. The latest shot was finished only 10 hrs before the deadline. There are some minor bugs in the anim, but I had no time to rerender the shots. There is also a long todo list. All humans are done from the same matrices, for future versions different shapes were good. Also the humans need some more modelling. I find the dialog scenes someway ugly, but currently I don't know how to change. While creating the humans with Pov macros, the parsing time is heavy increasing, often I've frames where the parsing is much longer than the rendering (ex. 7 minutes parse, 3 minutes render).