TITLE: Tea2
NAME: John Trzesniak
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: sfgroup@ix.netcom.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.tsfg.com
TOPIC: Metamorphosis
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: tea2.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.0.2

TOOLS USED: 
    XingMPEG Encoder

CREATION TIME: 
    15 days, rendering was 24 hours total elapsed time

HARDWARE USED: 
    150 MHz Pentium, 32 mb ram

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 


This animation shows a fly-through of mysterious castle-like hallways until the
viewer
comes to a strange and deadly surprise.


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
    Created at 20 frames/sec (but Xing will not go below
23.95 so it's a little fast)
                         Win95 Media Player works well


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


The animation started out as an "pick the subject yourself" final project for a

Computer Graphics class at DePaul University in Chicago, IL where I am a
graduate student.
I chose to do a fly-through of the Mideval Times castle that we have in the
Schamburg, IL 
area.  I even met with the Marketing Manager there and he took me around so I
could take some 
rough measurements and some photos.  

Being my first foray into the world of modelling and animation, I thought I
could do this 
without a modeller (boy was I wrong).  I started to try to replicate the
interior of the 
castle but soon found it too difficult so I changed the project a bit to what
you see today.  

In our class, we had a class-wide contest to see who could do the best "thing"
with/to a teapot
for animation and still images.  The animation clip was voted "Best Animation of
a Teapot" by 
all the members of the class and our Professor, Dr. Rosalee Wolfe.

Frames were rendered using the standard animation support in Povray for Windows.
 In the original, 
the frames were assembled into a FLI file using Dave's Targa Animator.  
The original animation is a 6 mb FLI file.

There are about 13 shot sequences each remdered individually.  The animation
totals about 
690 frames.  I had to cut the original frames down a bit to make the MPG fit
into the 3 mb 
contest limit.  The scene that took the most time was the scene where the shiny
silver teapot
starts to come through the bars of the cage.  The sequence was 80 frames and it
took over 8 solid
hours to render.

No modeller was used in this animation.  Unfortunately, I couldn't find a good
modeller until after this was complete (now I use Breeze Designer).  All objects

were planned out on paper ahead of time, complete with dimensions. The teapot is

the bezier patch (?) teapot that comes with POV.

