EMAIL: jps6860@yahoo.com
NAME: Jason Smith
TOPIC: Journey
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: The Oracle
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: http://home.earthlink.net/~jtsmith7
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1
TOOLS USED: Moray 3.3, PhotoDeluxe, CMPEG
CREATION TIME: 1 month creation; 1 week render
HARDWARE USED: Athlon 600Mhz, 128 MB RAM
VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:

"April 15

At last I can see the goal of my journey.  After weeks of 
difficulty I have reached the base of the Oracle's peak.
Only one last obstacle stands in my way, but then I will
consult the Oracle and all will be made clear."

-- an excerpt from an explorer's journal

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:

This is my second entry into the animation category and my ninth 
IRTC entry overall.  

When the topic was announced I thought about the typical storybook 
journey of tracking down a wise man for answers.  Of course the wise 
man not wanting to be bothered always lives in some remote 
difficult to reach location.  But what happens if the wise man has 
to move?  Just think of the poor person that hasn't heard the news.

As usual, I did all of the work (modeling, setup and animation) 
through Moray.  

I knew I was going to need some sort of figure in order to tell
the story, but I wasn't after anything realistic looking.  My 
first attempt was actually a stick figure made up of cylinders 
and spheres, but the head made things look very odd.  I guess
stick figures weren't meant to be in 3D.  I eventually went with 
using superquads for the limbs.  It took quite a few revisions 
before the proportions were correct, but I eventually came up with
the figure you see.  I didn't bother to set up IK, since I could
never get it to work quite right in past projects.  Instead I 
rotated each limb 'tree' by hand to come up with the keyframes.

Next up was the opening mountain shot.  That scene uses two 
heightfields.  One for the mountain and another for the small
surrounding hills.  Both heightfield images were created in POV-Ray.
I just applied a B&W texture to a plane facing the camera 
(spherical colormap for the mountain and spotted colormap 
for the hills).  To texture the mountain I just colorized the 
texture I used to produce the heightfield image.

The title image was created by using a white texture on the mountain
and a black texture on the hills.  The text and gumball machine
were added through post processing.

The sky throughout the scenes is made up of a blue textured sphere
and a plane of clouds that can be moved around as needed.  I tried
putting the clouds on the sphere, but it didn't turn out as good
as using a plane.

The snow covered mountain top is another heightfield.  The hut is
just a hollowed out cube with rounded cube corner caps.  The wall 
texture is made of a crackle pigmentmap and normalmap.  I originally
tried using heightfield for the walls.  While they looked good, it
probably would have increased the render time drastically.  Good for 
a still, not for an animation.

The lighting for all the scenes were done with 'hemibox lighting'.
Five blue tinted area lights create a large cube around the scene.
A smaller orange tinted area light acts as the sun.

I also did a small amount of post processing.  The title image 
was composited in MS Paint and the title fade was done in 
PhotoDeluxe.  The iris out (or is it in?) at the end of the 
animation was done in POV-Ray.  I mapped the image on a 
cube and intersected a cylinder.

When I had all the frames done, I put everything together
with CMPEG.

Due to time constrains I did have some ideas that I never got to
complete.  I had hoped to have a few scenes of the figure going up 
the mountain. I think by watching the person struggle up the 
mountain it would have given the animation a more serious tone, 
causing the end to be much more of a surprise.

I've included a zip file that has quite a few things in it.  I've 
included the Moray file for the opening mountain shot, as well as
the POV-Ray files as exported by Moray and the heightfield images.
Also included is the Moray file that contains the summit objects
(figure, snowfield, and hut).  This file doesn't include any
keyframes, since they spanned quite a few files.  The Moray 
exported POV-Ray files for the summit objects are also present.