TITLE: abduction
NAME: Lou Bruce
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: lou_bruce@yahoo.com
WEBPAGE: none at present
TOPIC: Life
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: abduct.mpg
ZIPFILE: abduct.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Blender 2.04

TOOLS USED: 
    Blender 2.04, Amorphium for Text Modeling, SolidWorks 2000 for the
house model,
Microsoft Image Composer for textures, 
Blender 2.04 for Rendering, Audiorack32 for sound editing, DDClip Free for final
composition and soundtrack production and finally AVI2MPG1 for conversion from
raw AVI to MPG.

CREATION TIME: 
    2 Months
Final Rendering: 8 to 12 Hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    233 MHz Pentium MMX

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 

The tired little dog is just settling down for a good night's sleep, when the
invasion force arrives. The three flying saucers have orders to abduct a human.
Just after the tractor beams begin lifting the dog, the alien in command
realizes that they have made a mistake. This is not a human. He aborts the
abduction and the saucers continue on their way. However, the little dog is not
very happy about the rude awakening. His reaction is to treat the saucers as he
would any other annoyance.


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
    Window Media Player

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


I began modeling the dog before I had a story in mind, he was my first attempt
at a nurbs model in Blender. He is based on a sketch from the book "MAYA 2
Complete". The house began as a project in SolidWorks for a freind, he wanted a
model of a lake house he was considering building. I decided it would make a
good backdrop for this animation.
After the topic was announced I knew what my story would be and started the
animation. As the story progressed I realized that I needed the three settings
to get the story across. The saucers are just lathed poly meshes with a haloed
circle around the outer rim.
The alien started as only a head, then I imported a copy of Drago from the
previous project and cut off his head and tail. Then a grafted the alien head
onto the Drago body. The animation for the dog and alien are all inverse
kinematics, everything elese is forward kinematics. The process in blender is
simply set the frame number, position the objects and the insert key frames for
the objects. Then you can go back and edit the motion curves for final
tweaking.

The zip file contains the main scene with the dog, house and saucers.





The Archive file contains the Blender file DRAGOTITLE.blend which is the title
shot only.
For those of you interested in opening the Blender file, Blender is available as
a freeware download at www.blender.nl.