TITLE: Star Jump NAME: Tekno Frannansa COUNTRY: UK EMAIL: tek@evilsuperbrain.com WEBPAGE: http://www.evilsuperbrain.com TOPIC: Journey COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. MPGFILE: starjump.mpg RENDERER USED: POV-Ray for Windows v3.5 TOOLS USED: Free software: POV-Ray text editor Wings 3D (modelling launch site, asteroids, and space fleet) http://www.wings3d.com Poser 3 (the pilot) Virtual Dub (editing and subtitles) http://www.virtualdub.org TMPGEnc (mpeg encoding) http://www.tmpgenc.com Trial versions: Paint Shop Pro 7 (captions and computer screen images on the bridge, all other textures were made with pov) CREATION TIME: 150-200 hours (estimated) Far longer than I've ever spent on an IRTC entry! RENDER TIME: Most scenes rendered at between 10 and 15 seconds per frame, so: 12 hours approx. HARDWARE USED: Athlon 2200 (1800 MHz) 512MB DDR 3200 RAM Shuttle Barebone system ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: The maiden voyage of the first ship to be equipped with a "Jump Drive". A device capable of transporting the ship and crew instantaneously to another point in the universe. The problem is they have no control over their destination, they could arrive anywhere within a range of almost 1000 light years. This means, unlike a conventional test flight, this voyage will last for months, maybe even years, and the ship is equipped to deal with any situation it may encounter. It has conventional engines capable of sustaining 0.9 times the speed of light, which means when it gets close enough to it's destination it can switch to using them. But there is a more pressing matter: 17 years ago a fleet of spacecraft were launched on a mission to colonise a distant planet. Travelling on conventional engines they can only achieve 0.8 times the speed of light. This may seem slow, but it means any signal we send to them now won't arrive until 14 years after they reach their destination. We have discovered that the plants they're transporting in suspended animation, to terraform the planet on their arrival, carry a genetic defect that could wipe out their entire food chain within just a few years. Thier scientists can fix the defect if they know where to look, but they are unlikely to find it until it's too late. So the aim of this mission is two-fold; to test the Jump Drive, and to catch up with the fleet and notify them of this defect... VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: There's a lot of black, so I suggest viewing it full screen in a darkened room. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: concept ======= I wanted to find a way to combine what I like to create with the topic for this round. What I tend to create are lots of pretty pictures, generally with a sci-fi/surrealist feel to them, but with no real relationship between one piece and the next. And that lead me onto the idea of a jump drive: The jump drive concept isn't new, it's been used in lots of sci-fi stories before, but this time I'm using it as a device to portray a journey through space as something other than just a scrolling starfield! Obviously I take a lot of artistic license with the places where the ship arrives. And those places aren't meant to be realistic, this is a fantastical journey in the style of much more abstract science fiction. Though for you sci-fi buffs out there I guess we could come up with a techno-babble explanation that the craft always arrives in areas of equal gravitational pull, i.e. it's always near some spectacular scenery and not just drifting in space! :) design ====== The ship evolved out of some Chris Foss inspired space ships I'd been building, and the desire to build a detailed but very fast rendering object. Basically it's just a blob with an image map on it (the image is also generated in pov). One nice touch is that I rigged up the boosters on the ship to automatically fire according to the ship's acceleration as it follows a spline. Most of the scenes were born out of strong images I had in my mind, most notably the sequence with the ship hovering above the "water". I'm pleased, and surprised, to say that they nearly all turned out how I wanted. Though most of them continued to evolve beyond my initial vision. render techniques ================= I knew this animation had to be long, which meant I had to render a lot of frames. So every single scene in this animation is designed to render in about 10 seconds per frame. The slowest goes up to around 20 seconds per frame. I don't want to go into too much detail (this text file is already quite long!), but here's some general notes: Most of the scenes use a sky sphere to fake a more complex effect, e.g. wherever you see a planet and the horizon line has an atmosphere above it, that atmosphere is actually behind the planet, on the sky sphere! Also the shot of the nebula near the end is acheived just using a sky sphere, no media or anything. There's a lot of normal maps pretending to be surface details (e.g. the desert planet, the fleet of ships at the end), and a lot of flat textures pretending to be normal maps (e.g. the main space ship has no normal map just a texture with dark and light lines in roughly the right places, and the nebula at the end has no lighting at all). Everything is as simple as I could make it, or I didn't put it in. There's no point having one scene that takes 2 minutes per frame on a project like this, it would just be unworkable. Unfortunately that means I had to cut a lengthy flight through a nebula and replace it with the much simpler nebula effect, but it still looks nice. details ======= I haven't provided the source code because it's a sprawling mass of untidiness! I'm happy to send people an explanation of any of the techniques I've used, along with relevant bits of source code. Please contact me if you want to know more :) Tek http://www.evilsuperbrain.com