EMAIL:karl@pemail.net
NAME:Karl Manning
TOPIC: Metamorphise
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves.
COUNTRY: England
WEBPAGE: http://www.yi.com/home/ManningKarl
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray V3.02 (Windows 95)
TOOLS USED:

Paint tools
	Paintshop Pro V4.12
	A4 colour scanner
	Pencil/paper

Mpeg creators
	cmpeg
	MainActor V1.5

MPeg Viewers
	Xing 
	Hypermpeg
	Dmpeg
	MainActor V1.5

CREATION TIME:
3hrs 2secs to generate all the frames
about 15 mins to generate the mpeg.

HARDWARE USED: Pentium 133 32Mb memory

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:

The penny drops, bounces, and spins, shakes itself into pieces, the hand closes on the spinning fragments and crushes it into a 5-pound note, the hand opens, and the note unfolds.

Total number of frames 191

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

The hand is a mixture of blobs and cylinders. The overall texture is a plain flesh colour, with a large crackle normal applied to it.

After spending a lot of time wiggling my fingers, and drawing them (hence thats why its a left hand, as I draw with my right hand !) I worked out that the bit that moves the most is the finger tips / first knuckle joint. This means only 2 variables per finger are defined which is a lot easier to track than the 4 I originally thought I'd have to do.

Both sides of the penny were scanned in. Each scan was split into 16 squares in Paintshop, and saved as gifs (a total of 32 images - rather time consuming). These were then used as a height field to give the texture to the coin.

The whole coin was defined as the union of all the smaller fragments.

The bounce/spin was done by rotating the coin through lessening X angles, and then rotating it by a fixed amount through Y. The Y rotation was a constant through the animation until the note.

The fragments were then translated by differing amounts before the rotation, so you get the explosion of fragments.

Reverse this to bring back together. There are 16 coin fragments, but only 8 note fragments. I cross-faded to the note fragments, by increasing the transmit value of the coin texture, while decreasing the transmit value of the note texture, to help conceal the change over in fragments.

The note fragment was a bi_cubic patch - initially defined as "jaggy" as possible (using u/vsteps of 1,flatness 1), then over time it becomes a flat square. The texture on the note was an image map of a £5 note (split into 8 pieces).

As the bi_cubic was flattening, it was rotated, translated so the note un-folds.

The background was deliberately kept simple, so that you would be more focused on the animation, not the background.

General info

For working out coordinates, I generally started with the last frame in a section and worked backwords. A section was defined by a starting clock value and an end clock value. Each section had its own normalised clock, created by subtracting the "segment position" from the clock variable. This meant that I was dealing with a value from 0 -> 0.1 (in most sections) which is a lot easier to to work with than, say 0.45 -> 0.55

I spent ages messing around with cmpeg and a variety of (poor) creators/viewers - mainly dos based. Then I found MainActor. This has been brilliant. Nice windows front end, preview, change time per frame, generates any animation format. Its also shareware !



Karl Manning
karl@pemail.net
22/11/97