TITLE: GPC (gpc_lb.mpg) (Galactic Pest Control) NAME: Lou Bruce COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: lou_bruce@yahoo.com WEBPAGE: N/A TOPIC: Explosion COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. MPGFILE: gpc_lb.mpg ZIPFILE: gpc_lb.zip RENDERER USED: Blender 2.37a TOOLS USED: Blender 2.37a for modeling and animation. Adobe Photoshop 7.0 for the Poster Audacity for compositing the soundtrack. TMPEGnc for adding sound and converting to Mpeg Magpie for synchronizing the video events with the audio. CREATION TIME: 24 days HARDWARE USED: AMD Athlon XP2500, 512MB ram ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: This is an imaginary advertisement for a company that destroys planets. VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: Windows Media Player or Totem DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: I was inspired by the movie trailer for "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy". So I started building a scene that would imitate the film trailer as close as my knowledge and skill would allow. As it progressed I decided to use Gustav Holst's compositon "Mars: The bringer of War" as recorded by the Georgian Festival Orchestra, Jahni Mardjani Conducting; as my soundtrack. That mixed with various explosion and sound effects that I've collected from the web became the final soundtrack. I need to give credit to several blender users for tutorials, inspiration, objects and textures. The referenced images, blend files, and animations can be found on: http://centralsource.com/blender/explosions/ Thanks so much to the following for sharing there hardwork with fellow blender artists. M@dcow @ce Macke Technically the geometry is mostly simple spheres and planes. The planet texture is a jpeg of Mars. The background is a jpg. The various explosions are mostly halo materials with varying halo size color and texture. The first shockwave is my own creation a spin extruded wavy profile with a modified shockwave texture built on Macke's texture. The animated text are meshes that were converted from text objects and animated with relative vertex keys. I was disappointed in the debris. I used the particle system with dupliverts to make instance copies of a master rock. I wasn't able to figure out how to get the speed and control that I wanted. I also couldn't find a combination of materials/textures that I liked. Overall I'm pretty well pleased with the end result, if only I had another month to experiment.