TITLE: The Jump
NAME: Malte Marwedel
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: m.marwedel@onlinehome.de
WEBPAGE: http://www.marwedels.de/malte
TOPIC: Special Effects
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: thejump.mpg
ZIPFILE: thejump.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.6

TOOLS USED: 
    KPov-Modeler, ffmpeg, GIMP, KmPlot

CREATION TIME: 
    Many days modelling, 3 hours rendering (640x480)

HARDWARE USED: 
    Mobile Sempron 2800+, 512MB RAM

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 

First you see how the car is build, since cars could never be build that way,
its the first special effect. Next you see how the surrounding is build. Then
the car jumps over the ramp like you can watch it as special effect in many
action movies. In the middle of the jump the time is slowed down and the camera
rotates, a special effect you can see in some science fiction movies. Then the
car gets back to earth and bumps against a sign showing my copyright.


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
    Simple method Just watch with your favourite program


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 

It is a single big POV-Ray file, controlled only by the "clock" value. As the
car is build together step by step I guess you see which elements have been
used for the individual parts of the scene. I hope this step-by step build-up
could show some people how they could start making animations theirself.
Everythin was made with KPovModeler, the .pov file is nothing more than an
exported file of the Modeller. However I used direct .pov Code within the
Modeller for the timing control and loops.
GIMP has been used for the movie poster only.

Note to the mathematics used for the jump: First I wanted to let the car roll
and fly physically correct, unfortunately I did not figure out how to directly
calculate the position of the car to any given scene time, since the
acceleration (necessary for speed, the speed again necessary for the position)
varies with the angle of the ramp. The ramp itself is a 2/3 (0_...270_) of a
cosine wave. I guess I could have solved this with integration, but this was
too confusing for me here. Moreover I would have to broke the position up to
their length from the starting point and height on the ramp, where again the
height would depend on the position which we want to calculate...
I ended up using a linear translation in the horizontal direction and vary the
speed a little bit with a sine factor so that the car is faster at the botton
of the ramp than at the top. I figured the values out by try-and-error playing
around with KmPlot. If you load the file car-speed1.fkt (given in the source)
you see the three lines. The x-axis is the time axis. The green line shows the
POSITION if the car would have the always the same horizontal speed. The green
line shows the POSITION (depending on the time) used in my scene. The blue line
shows the derivative of the green line, displaying the SPEED of the car at any
given time. You see at first the speed is at a  minimum, then at the botton of
the ramp the speed is at a maximum and where the car leaves the ramp the speed
is between the beginning and the maximum speed. Note: I simply ignored the
vertical speed at this point.
This is not physical correct but at least it looks good enough in the scene.
Moreover I want to mention that rotating the car was difficult too since these
rotating of POV-Ray not always worked than I expected it to do... ;-)

The houses: I made the houses with much more detail than you can see in the
image. The same house is used each time but has a lot of randomised parameters.
Randomised values are: Scale in length, scale in with, position to the centre
north-south, position to the center west-east, one of three different colours
is used for the body, every individual window is either dark or bright,
mirrored west-east or not and mirrored north-south or not. Unfortunately the
houses looks still very similar from the point of the car.

The trees: Every tree consist only of two simple objects. A cylinder as root and
a sphere as top. Again, there are randomised parameters for each tree. The top
has one of three different colours, position to the centre north-south,
position to the centre west-east, and scale.

Finally the individual frames were merged into the movie file with the program
ffmpeg.

INTENTION WHY I SUBMITTED THE SOURCE CODE:
I added the source code for two purposes:
First to make a high resolution version of the animation.
Second I want to show beginners how to create animations.

WHAT YOU MAY AND MAY NOT DO WITH THE SOURCE CODE:
You may generate the video with other resolutions.
You may look into the source code and learn from it.
You may copy the the video and UNMODIFIED source code together with this file to
your friends (on LAN parties etc.).
You may modify the source code for experimenting purpose.
You may NOT spread modified versions of this source code.
You may NOT post the video and /or source code somewhere else on the web without
asking me. However you may post some single frames on the internet (like the
movie poster) as long as you metion where the full video is found (make a link
to the IRTC page and/or my webpage).

Everythink else: Just ask me :-)

THE ZIP FILE OF THE SOURCE CODE CONTAINS:
thejump.txt        This file
car-speed1.fkt     KmPlot File
thejump.jpg        Movie poster
car1-1.kpm         The whole scene as file for KPovModeler
car1-1.pov         Exported version of the file above
ani1.ini           File for POV-Ray to render the frames
anim.sh            Shell script which executes POV-Ray and ffmpeg
storybook1.txt     Some notes what happens when in the scene

End of File