EMAIL: amdebe1@ulster.net NAME: William de Beaumont TOPIC: The End of... COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: The End of Good and Evil RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5 TOOLS USED: vim, nedit, pencil, paper CREATION TIME: started on 2003.12.31, worked up to the deadline, 2004.01.15 HARDWARE USED: my Celeron 300A, my roommate's Pentium 4 2GHz VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: slow it down to 12fps, I didn't have time to render enough frames to get a higher framerate ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: This is my first attempt at a really abstract raytraced animation. Most of the animation is in black and white, representing good and evil. A sphere on a checkered plane (had to do it ;-) gains contrast and becomes two half-circles, one black, one white. The camera turns and this is revealed to be the top of a wine glass filled with black and white substances. The camera spins around the glass, and the substances swirl, turning it into a yin-yang. The dots continue in from the edges, and morph into airplanes, while the background turns mountainous. Finally, the planes collide, producing a colorful fireball, the only color in the whole animation. It is neither good, nor evil, and it represents the end of both. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: The animation consists of 4 scenes, in separate files: checkerball: This is just the sphere-on-checkered-plane, simple stuff. I kinda had to fake the contrast-enhancement with a pigment gradient on the sphere, instead of doing it with lighting, because that didn't work so well. goblet: This is the yinyang forming in the wineglass. I think I spent the most time on this part. The larger swirling is accomplished with a function based pigment. The smaller swirls that eventually form the dots are actually cones sticking out just a little bit, with a similar pigment. The wineglass is just a cut off blob with a torus lip at the cutoff. The scene is surrounded by a mirrored inverse box, with a little bit of hard-water stain pigmentation, so you can tell it's a mirror. planes: This is where the yinyang dots turn into planes, and the background turns into mountains by the sea. The planes are blobs, and the dots are just spheres intersecting them. The background is a (very time-consuming) isosurface. I tried to make the "mountains" look higher than the "sea", but it didn't turn out so visible. explosion: This is where the planes collide, crumple, and explode. The explosion is something I'm particularly proud of, and made easy with isosurfaces. The explosion is actually transparent with an IOR, and that produces some very explosion-like (if unexpected) effects. The planes crumpling isn't as visible as I wanted it to be, but then again it doesn't look as good as I wanted it to, so it balances out ;-). I had an idea for an additional scene zooming back out to the sphere-on-checkered-plane, and turning that into a crystal ball, but alas, I ran out of time. Most of the scenes use splines for the camera movement, which is a vast improvement over weird mathematical formulas for camera location that I had used in povray 3.1, both in quality and ease of use.