TITLE: Storm Spirits
NAME: Jimmy Tang
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: jrtang85@yahoo.com
TOPIC: Duel
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COPYRIGHT
MPGFILE: storm.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Blender 2.33a - 2.34 Windows
OTHER TOOLS USED: Photoshop 7.0, WinGimp 1.2.5, TMPGenc

CREATION TIME: 
    a little time every day for about 2 months
            :) -- 100-150 hours?
RENDER TIME: maybe around 22 hours... I don't keep track

HARDWARE USED: 
    Intel P4 Mobile-3Ghz, 512M RAM
               Intel Pentium M 1.3, 256M RAM
               Intel P4 2.4Ghz, 1G RAM

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 


Inspiration for the two combatants comes from
Japanese mythological beings Fujin and Raijin
representing wind and lightning. They fight
an endless series of battles.


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 

adjust your gamma to suit I guess.... this anim could have
used some lighting tweaks or postprocessing.

CREATION METHOD: The static grass was generated and animated 
through the 'Fiber' Python script. The animated grass is
just a bunch of duplicated blades keyed to particles, because
the animation script took too long >_<. Everything else was done 
from scratch as a subdivision surface. Textures were painted
in Photoshop and Gimp. Sequencing and compositing were done 
internally in Blender.

NOTES: I approached this project as a learning experience. 
This was pretty much the first time I had played with the
armature system, or done any character modelling, or used 
any kind of scene/camera sequencing in an animation. "Duel"
was just a fun topic to play with, fortunately coming
during the summer when I had the time to make an entry. 
Thanks for the Blender team for an awesome program, thanks 
to the IRTC team for an awesome competition :)