TITLE: Astroid Life NAME: Erik Shelley COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: shellerik@yahoo.com WEBPAGE: http://www.erikshelley.com/ TOPIC: Evolution COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. MPGFILE: astrlife.mpg ZIPFILE: astrlife.zip RENDERER USED: POV-RAY 3.5 TOOLS USED: ActivePerl 5.8.0.806, Dave's Targa Animator, avi2mpg1 CREATION TIME: 2-3 weeks HARDWARE USED: 1.73 GHz AMD ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: A lifeform is born in an astroid field. It is different than it's peers. The difference seems to help it survive. It passes on this diffence to its offspring. VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: Works in Windows Media Player DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: The planet, astroids, and lifeforms are all really simple. The interesting part was placing and moving so many objects. I decided to use perl to generate the pov scene. I wrote a script to position the objects and the camera and to make sure there were no collisions. I didn't give myself enough time to do what I originally envisioned but I did manage to get enough finished to convey the main ideas. The astroids are isosurfaces using function { f_sphere(x,y,z,1) + f_wrinkles(x+rmod,y+rmod,z+rmod) } where rmod is a random number generated for each astroid. The final animation was 1300 frames which took almost 24 hours to parse and trace without antialiasing. I didn't have time to do the whole thing with antialiasing so I had to cut the number of frames in half. It took about 40 hours to create the final animation. The perl script and pov scene are really a mess so I decided not to provide them. I don't think there is anything to be learned from them.