TITLE: The Tortoise NAME: Michael Hartley COUNTRY: Malaysia EMAIL: hartleym@pmail.sit.edu.my WEBPAGE: http://www.angelfire.com/mt/ofolives TOPIC: Inner Workings COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. MPGFILE: tortoise.mpg RENDERER USED: Povray (3.0.2 ?) TOOLS USED: CMPEG to (free DOS program) convert TGA's to an MPEG file. Microsoft Paint to draw the image and normal maps for the spaceship imagoWeb (free Windows program) to convert the resulting BMPs to PNG for use in PovRay. CREATION TIME: 1 month to think of the idea, 2 months on and off to design the scenes, a final render might take 12-15 hrs, if I did one. HARDWARE USED: 166 MHz Pentium MMX ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: What makes the world go round? Is it love? Money? Or something else...? It was once believed that the earth rested on the back of a gigantic tortoise. The march of modern scientific thought has caused this idea to fall into ridicule and declining popularity. The space age has shown that, in fact, there is no longer any such tortoise. The only possible conclusion is that the tortoise which once supported the earth has retreated in shame in the face of public mockery. In this animation, based on SCIENTIFIC FACTS* amongst other things**, we discover what new niche, what pivotal role, the tortoise now occupies. Footnotes: * Specifically, the following scientific facts: The earth is round, The earth has a moon, Tortoises have 4 legs. ** such as wild irrational speculation. VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: None. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: I created the frames using the standard animation support in Povray. I used about 7 different .pov files (but discarded the output of one of them). I used some third party textures and include files, specifically, * A cylindrical map of the moon (downloaded from somewhere) * A cylindrical map of the earth, converted from a spherical map of the earth (Please don't ask why I bothered to do this) which I downloaded years ago (before the age of the WWW). the conversion was done using a program of my own, written eons ago and long since lost * xstars.inc, likewise downloaded from the internet. Much nicer stars than my "The City" stills submission "asteroid". Sorry, I can't remember the URLs for any of these downloads. All other image_maps and compound objects etc are my own work. No path generators, or object modelers etc etc were used. Ouch. Lessons I learnt: * Next time I will plan the project more carefully, so I can give more care to the scenes at the end, if I need to. * Next time, the clock variable will represent real time. * In science fiction movies, when the camera zooms past a planet... it looks very nice, but it takes some work (either mathematical calculations or a lot of trial and error) to gt the camera close enough to the planet without crashing into it Tips: * The function f(t) = 3 t^2 - 2 t^3 has the following useful properties: f(0) = 0, f(1) = 1, and the derivatives at 0 and 1 are both zero. Therefore, something like this: #declare ff = clock*clock*(3-2*clock) sphere { ff*y, 0.2 } produces a sphere that starts stationary at <0,0,0> when clock=0, and finishes stationary at <0,1,0> when clock=1. I used this kind of trick a number of times in my animation. One example is towards the end, when the camera pans around the tortoise. Basically, I use: camera { ... rotate 360*ff*x } to get a pan that does not seem to jerk at the beginning and end. Acknowledgements: I want to acknowledge my Lord Jesus Christ, who helped make sure that the scenes worked out ok, especially those for which I didn't have time for a second try! And for making sure my itchy fingers didn't delete certain files I only _thought_ I wouldn't need again...