EMAIL: AmaltheaJ5@aol.com
NAME: Mike Hough
TOPIC:  Metamorphosis
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT
TITLE: Monarch
COUNTRY: USA
RENDERER USED: POV-ray 3.02 for Windows, POV-ray 3.02 for DOS
TOOLS USED: avi2mpg1, videdit, Winpov editor, Paint Shop Pro, Ray Dream Studio 5, Creative Wave Studio, crossroads, bend.inc
CREATION TIME: About 20 hours to render frames used.  Still putting together as I write this
HARDWARE USED:  PII300 64MB RAM
ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:

	This is the metamorphosis of the monarch butterfly.  The scene takes place on a misty summer day.  It begins with the caterpillar crawling on a milkweed plant.  It hangs down from the bottom of another leave to create it's chrysalis, from which it will emerge and unfold it's wings.  One very interesting thing about this is that the chrysalis is actually the body of the caterpillar, not spun like a cocoon.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:

	I began the project doing the change from the caterpilliar to the chrysalis.  For this I used a blob.  Each sphere in the blob uses one of five declared colors and they are scaled and translated to make the desired change.  This took me awhile, but not as long as making the caterpillar crawl.  For that I used a blob again, but each component is rotated and translated with overlapping #if statements that rely on the changing clock.  This is how I got the wavy movement.  I used a halo to fade the chrysalis.  The clear chrysalis remains visible after the butterfly emerges because that is what actually occurs (some people had asked me if that was right)

	The butterfly is made up of blobs for the body and antennae, and polygons for wings. I used a few image_maps to 'paint' the colors onto the wings and body.  The plant was created in Ray Dream Studio and exported as a dxf.  This was converted to a pov inc with crossroads ver2.  Since the scene uses several copies of the plant, I changed the union of triangles to a mesh.  Clouds are a translated pattern on a plane.  Used some ground fog for 'atmosphere'.  Almost forgot, I used Colefax's bend.inc to make the caterpillar hanging down.  The scene uses two lights, one of which originally used an an area light, which looked really nice but was excluded for obvious reasons;]

	I didn't intend to add any sound, but the program I used for encoding the mpeg from an avi would not produce a standard mpg without it.  I used creative wave studio (came with my sound card) to add the fading in and out.  It didn't seem to make the file much bigger. I used the PSP batch conversion utility to convert the tga's that pov created to dib files. I then loaded them as a dib sequence into videdit.

	I'm including the pov source in a zip file, but I've decided to omit the mesh and images (for image_maps) to save me a long upload.