TITLE: medusas NAME: Johannes Ewers COUNTRY: Germany EMAIL: Johannes.Ewers@t-online.de WEBPAGE: not yet TOPIC: Creatures COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. MPGFILE: medusa.mpg ZIPFILE: medusa.zip RENDERER USED: povray 3.1 TOOLS USED: Moray 3.1 for all basic modelling, trial version of Microsoft J++ 1.0 Java development tool (came with a JAVA book) for animation control programm trial version of MainActor 1.5 for converting images into AVI-clips (came with my graphics board) trial version of VideoWave II for cutting and blending of several clips trial version of Xing Mpeg Encoder for coding of final movie (seems to produces better output than VideoWave) Photshop 4 for creation of "movie poster" CREATION TIME: about 20 hours HARDWARE USED: Celeron 433, 128 MB ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: Medusas (or jellyfish) are fascinating creatures of the sea. The animation shows a small submarine that encounters a school of medusas. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: Some month ago I saw a movie about underwater life with nice pictures of divers swimming through a school of jellyfish. That gave me the idea for this project. The first step was to find a good way to animate the school of medusas. They should move around as a group but avoid the submarine. Searching the web I found an interesting solution in the work of Craig Reynolds (http://hmt.com/cwr/boids.html). Reynolds had written a program that simulated the behavior of schools of fishes and flocks of birds for SIGGRAPH '87. He called his simulated animals "boids" (bird androids). He desribed the basic principles of the program in his conference paper. Based on this paper I wrote a small JAVA program that handles the interaction of medusas and submarine. It creates position information as a sequence of POV-INC files for all medusas and for the submarine. Sea-scenery, medusas and submarine were modeled with Moray 3.1. The exported POV-files were modified and assembled by hand to create the animation frames. That was a quick hack. Therefore the program is not very elegant or easy to use. Send an email if you have questions about the JAVA or POV code. This was my first animation project. It took much more time than I had anticipated, but it was a lot of fun, too. I would like to continue with some additions to the project; some more fishes or predators; a more realistic background.