TITLE: the Pool Shark

NAME: Neil Alexander
COUNTRY: Canada

EMAIL: stoker@echo-on.net
WEBPAGE: none

TOPIC: Games
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: poolshrk.mpg
ZIPFILE: poolshrk.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.02


TOOLS USED: 
    Paint Shop Pro, CMPeg


CREATION TIME: 
    18 hours 20 min. render time, approx 10 min. compile


HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium II 233 MHz


ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 
    This animation depicts a brief game of
billiards in which it is demonstrated that flashy dress and
over-confidence are rather unappreciated by some opponents when not
accompanied by adequate cue-handling ability.


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
    ActiveMovie, or any MPeg viewer that can
handle non-Xing mpeg files.  I find that if I run this animation
with my display set to 16 bit instead of 32 bit color, I get strange
banding artifacts all over the screen.  This may be specific to my
display driver, however.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


This is my first serious attempt at animation.  I've tried not to make
the motion look too linear - you will find mostly squared, square-root,
or sin/cos motion control equations in my control file.

The character and environment models are fairly straight-forward csg
constructions, with some image maps thrown in to liven up the background.
I got the toucan Guinness poster from
wombatix.physics.ucg.ie/misc/guinness.html,
and the other Guinness poster from www.rpi.edu/~baronm/guinness.html.
I was going to make the dartboard with a radial/wood pigment map, but
while I was looking for the Guinness posters, I stumbled across this
one at www.inch.com/~irish/guinness.html, so I used it instead.
I made the image map for the chalkboard using Paint Shop Pro.

All of the files to render this animation are included in poolshrk.zip
except for the fonts.  These are included in Windows 98, so you can
probably get ahold of them.