TITLE: It would be nice to travel...

NAME: Sascha Ledinsky
COUNTRY: Austria

EMAIL: sascha_l@users.sourceforge.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.jpatch.com

TOPIC: Travel
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: moai.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Inyo ( http://inyo.sourceforge.net )


TOOLS USED: 
    JPatch ( http://www.jpatch.com ) for modeling and animation
         JLipSync ( http://jlipsync.sourceforge.net ) lip-syncing
         IMPEdit ( http://imptools.sourceforge.net ) for "cutting"
         Audacity ( http://audacity.sourceforge.net ) for the soundtrack
         TMPGEnc ( http://www.tmpgenc.net ) for MPEG encoding.


CREATION TIME: 
    About a week, see description... ;-)


HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium IV, 1GB RAM, 2.8GHz


ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 


One fine day on Easter Island: After eons of silence, two Moais suddenly start
talking... about traveling!


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
    fullscreen, dim the lights, popcorn,...


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


Well, finally here it is: After two years of development this is the first
animation that was made with JPatch.

By the time the topic was announced, I had added morphs to JPatch. David Cuny's
JLipSync could be used to create timesheets for lip-syncing, and it was easy to
map the phonemes to morphs. I was convinced that I could write an animator
application in time, but for adding bones wasn't enough time - so there
wouldn't
be much motion in the animation - just morphs and speech. David had that great
idea about rocks who talk about how nice it would be to travel, and the first
thing that came to my mind when thinking about rock-faces was the Moais on
Easter Island...

All tools used to model, animate and render this animation were written by
David
Cuny (the Inyo renderer and JLipSync) and me (the JPatch modeler and animator,
and procedural texture support for Inyo) and are open source. David also did
the
voice recording. It was a race against time: After tweaking JPatch and Inyo to
support reference-geometry I started working on the Animator (that was about
christmas) - and finished it only three days before the deadline. Modeling the
Moais took about a day, lip-syncing and animating them a few hours, and
rendering another few hours.

The models are made of bezier splines - the splines form patches that are
subdivided using a scheme described in "A complete algorithm for real-time
spline-based character animation" by Martin D. Hash, the writer of
Animation:Master ( http://www.hash.com ). By moving the controlpoints that make
up the splines, characters are animated.

To ensure that the procedural 3D textures stick with the models (when they are
animated) a technique called reference-geometry was used (it's like U/V
mapping,
but for solid textures).

Inyo is a path-tracer written in Java and has some very interesting features,
yet only a few of them were used in this animation.

I did not include the source here, but I will include it in the next release of
JPatch.