EMAIL: steve@idsmail.com
NAME: Steve Schaneville
TOPIC: Metamorphosis
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Snail Paced
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: None
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.00.msdos.wat-cwa
CREATION TIME: 6 Days to render 838 frames, 6 hours to encode 1676 (2x838) frames to mpg.
HARDWARE USED: Pentium 90 w/ 32Mb RAM
TOOLS USED:

   a) sPatch -- truck body
   b) Blob Sculptor -- snail body
   c) Worm 0.4b -- snail shell
   d) Wilbur v1.20 -- read *.??? file (southeast California) for terrain heightfield
   e) PhotoStyler -- edit terrain heightfield and a few image maps
   f) Moray 2.5b -- everything 
   g) Sonya Roberts' Trees.inc file -- guess
   h) Chris Colefax's Lens.inc file -- sun
   i) Notepad & Wordpad -- edit *.pov files
   j) Anim8 -- 94% animation (787 of 838 frames)
   k) DigiMorph -- 6% animation (50 of 838 frames)
   l) CMPEG -- make *.mpg file


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS:

25 frames/second for right speed (1 min 6 sec length).  VMPEG will allow specifing frame rates.  I'm not at all happy with how much I had to compress to get under 3 Mb (quant=18).  If I could have specified 13 frames/sec (and not doubled up my frames), it'd be much better... does anyone know how to specify such a slow frame rate?


ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:

Before reading on, please view the animation first.  As this is my first animation ever, I encourage plenty comments.  Basically I metamorphicized Schnecky (the snail's and files' name) and a book title from "paced" to "paste".  The idea came to me thinging first about a catapillar changing to a butterfly which was directly suggested by the irtc, which lead to a frog changing into a prince which I figured I couldn't draw.  I figured I could draw a snail though, so I got to thinking about what I could do with him.  The anvil on the head like in cartoons came to mind, and I ended up with this animation.  Oh, the word "schnecke" means "snail" in German.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

The animation was rendered as 5 separate smaller animations and then placed together back to back.  The 5 animations are: a) 120 rendered frames for opening book scene, b) 25 morphed frames for entering book, c) 563 rendered frames inside the book, d) 25 morphed frames exiting book, and e) 105 rendered frames for final book scene.

Items were modeled in several difference programs.  Everything was then imported into Moray, edited, scaled to good relative sizes, and placed at their starting locations.  The files were exported and edited to accept Anim8 commands.  

There are 41 things that move (using over 1000 frame keys) in the animation (in order of appearence):

     1) camera -- translated
     2) look at (camera) -- translated
     3) book cover -- rotated
     4) clouds -- translated texture
     5) water -- phase shifted (can't seem to notice this anywhere in the animation)
* 6-29) snail blob components -- each translated individually
    30) snail glasses -- translated, rotated
 31,32) snail eyelid -- translated individually
 33,34) snail left & right pupil -- translated & scaled individually
    35) snail -- translated
    36) sunlight & lens flare -- translated together
    37) truck -- translated
 38,39) snail left & right eye -- translated & scaled individually
    40) safe -- translated
    41) book light -- color (fade to black at end)

* The most difficult thing was to make the snail move, which comprises some 700+ of the frame keys.  He's a blob, and there are no rotate commands to make him turn his head... its done by translating 23 individual blob components.  Glasses, eyes and pupils were rotated and translated each separately.

Post-processing -- I added the blinking "hours pass..." (while the shadow of the tree moves with the sun) with PhotoStyler after the frames were rendered.

I spent forever on the terrain, and hate it still.  I need advice on making realistic looking terrain.  I tried several different programs including Terrain Maker, with no success.  I wound up using Wilbur to read California geographical data (mountains) and flattened it so much it looks like a plane almost (not what I wanted).  Actually, painting the height field (with a texture) was what I really couldn't do.  Help!

All files (including Pov, Moray, Digimorph, Anim8, and image map files) are in the *.zip file.  All objects were modeled specifically for this animation.  Oh, I'm proud of the detail in the truck... to bad it can't be seen in the animation.

Thanks for reading through this... e-mail me with questions or anything...

-- Steve