EMAIL: evilsnack@hotmail.com NAME: John VanSickle TOPIC: Escape COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: A Narrow Escape WEBPAGE: http://users4.50megs.com/enphilistor/irtc.htm COUNTRY: US of A RENDERER USED: POV-Ray version 3.5. TOOLS USED: Text editor, CMPEG, pencils, paper. HARDWARE USED: Athlon XP 2400, 512 Megs of RAM CREATION TIME: About twelve weeks. Final rendering was done on the 27th of September. VIEWING RECOMMENDATION: Full color, 24 frames per second. ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: Unlike some other entrants, I actually do continue the stories that are "to be continued." DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: I typed out a bunch of scene code, rendered the frames, and slapped them together with an MPEG compiler, just like I always do. This is by far my longest animation yet. There are 2796 finished frames, plus 780 other frames that were rendered to be used as part of finished frames. The engineering section is new. I also had to develop a modified Greb scout ship so that it could have a part of it blown away. There are other minor changes to other models. Recently I've gone back to an old way of setting up animation scenes. When I first began to organize the scenes, I had one file to set up things peculiar to each shot. Then, starting with "Escape of the Greb" I went to a method where robots were done in one file, the camera was set up in another, etc. This turned out to be quite unwieldly, and recently-- starting with "A Noble Adventure"--I've gone back to one file for each shot. It allows me to quickly set up a scene that's similar to one already built. If you have any questions about things, e-mail me directly, or leave comments on the comments page (and be sure to put your e-mail address in the comments; sometimes the bot records the wrong address).