TITLE: After Their Last Supper NAME: Erin Garlock COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: egarlock@technologist.com WEBPAGE: http://members.easyspace.com/gametool/images/tips.html TOPIC: Decay COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. MPGFILE: eg_decay.mpg ZIPFILE: eg_decay.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1g TOOLS USED: cmpeg, Poser3 CREATION TIME: Several weeks to get the columns of flame and explosion down. 2 weeks to layout scene and get object motions down. A couple of days to learn poser and get the skeletons placed. Total Render Time: 1100 hours, roughly 9 straight days with all 6 machines running. HARDWARE USED: 2 P350 - 256Mb, 1 P233 - 96Mb, 1 P200 - 64Mb, 2 P166 - 64Mb ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: They trusted their king with all their heart. This was a mistake. It make take an eternity for a deteriorated soul to gather the courage to take revenge, but in an instant the deed is done. VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: Please send me an email if you wish to learn about this submission. I hope the source files are sufficient and self explanitory. The biggest comment I have though is that every entitiy is fairly independent of everything else. There are numerous "clock" variables floating around, but should also be fairly localized. In a nut shell, my intent was to adhere to an object oriented design, but with a non-OO tool it can be hard at times. There are a couple items about the animation that took some steeping learning time on my part to figure out, and are worth noting. In POV an area light is still a point light, the only difference is shadowing. If you really want a light source that has a dimension you have to use a collection of point/area lights. To see this look at the hotspots on the columns for each of the columns of flame. Using a single light source would have created a spot like you would see in the real world on a sphere. For an object, with an image for the pigment, that intersects with another object, the cojoining volume will be black even if both have transparency and are hollow. This shows up as a strange black area on the tapestry during the explosion sequence. If you know how to fix this, please let me know. And finally, if you want to use an atmospheric media for really cool look fog, forget it, at least for an animation sequence. I had to use the more generic Fog directive vs. media, otherwise I was going to be running many many hours per frame. Anyone have some free time on a CRAY I can borrow? Again, if you know of a work solution let me know.