TITLE:   Melvin's Happy-Time Speedy-Fast Driving Adventure


NAME: Byron Bashforth
COUNTRY:   Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada


EMAIL: bnb121@mail.usask.ca
WEBPAGE:   http://www.cs.usask.ca/grads/~bnb121


TOPIC: Transportation
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: melvin.mpg
RENDERER USED: 

  3D Studio Max
  POV-Ray 3.02


TOOLS USED: 

  sPatch
  Crossroads
  Paint Shop Pro
  mpeg_encode


CREATION TIME: 

  Rendering:  19 hrs 27 min
  Encoding:  approx 15 min


HARDWARE USED: 

  Dual Pentium Pro 200, 128 MB RAM, Windows NT 4.0 (rendering)
  Sun Ultra Sparc, 62 MB RAM, SunOS (encoding)


ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 


  Please see the self-explanatory title:
    "Melvin's Happy-Time Speedy-Fast Driving Adventure"



VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 

  This animation was encoded for playback at 24 fps.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


The idea
~'~'~'~'
  SETTING:  Department of Computer Science Seminar.  Someone is talking about 
  something too complicated for most of the audience to understand.  In the 
  back of the room boredom and conversation break out simultaneously.
  BYRON: "Are you paying attention to this?"
  KEVIN: "Not a chance...I'm just grocery shopping in my head."
  BYRON: "Let me run this animation idea by you, there's this happy little
          roadster ripping through the country-side.  All he wants to do
          is go as _fast_ as he can.  Suddenly, out of no where, a bus
          appears..."
  <some time later>
  KEVIN: "You know...anything with cows is funny."
  <more time passes>
  BYRON: <moving hand in an arc> "Moo..."
  <laughter>
  <more time passes>
  KEVIN: <moving hand in an arc> "Moo..."
  <more laughter>
  BYRON: "So what's the car's name?"
  KEVIN: "Let's call him...Melvin"
  BYRON: "Moo..."
  <laughter again>


Characters
~'~'~'~'~'
  Melvin's body, fenders, and interior were constructed with sPatch.  Once
  imported into 3D Studio, other details were added, including the steering 
  wheel, console, gear shift, CD collection in the glove compartment (just 
  kidding), eyes, eyebrows, and mouth.

  The bus was also created with sPatch and then divided into four separate
  meshes (a mesh for the front, back, driver side, and passenger side).  Each
  mesh was imported into 3D Studio and texture-mapped individually (with
  images created with Paint Shop Pro).  Details, like the lights and grill,
  were added with 3D Studio Max.
  
  Bessie the Aerial Cow originated as a freeware model (downloaded from Avalon).
 
  It wasn't exactly what I wanted so I performed a little mesh surgery:  removed

  horns, altered the tail, etc.  Building the spotted texture map was probably 
  the most difficult part of modelling the cow.  Ever tried taking a flat
bitmap
  and wrapping it around a cow-shaped object?

  The semi tractors and sedan were also derived from freeware meshes (again,
  downloaded from Avalon) and modified and textured to suit this animation. 
The
  trailers were textured with bitmaps created with Paint Shop Pro.


Setting
~'~'~'~
  To keep the environment looking like a cartoon, the background objects were
  modelled as simply as possible.

  The blue sky and puffy clouds were rendered with POV-Ray as a 5024x800 
  image and then used a cylindrical environment map in 3D Studio Max.

  Four different trees were created, each consisting of some deformed sphere
  perched above a couple of cylinders - replicated, scaled, and rotated to
  taste.


Easter eggs
~'~'~'~'~'~
  The maroon sedan that Melvin passes in the first scene is being driven by 
  Dancing Baby Cha-Cha.
  
  The sign on the back of the senior tour bus reads "How's my Driving? Call 
  555-Slow".
  
  The first truck that blocks Melvin's attempt to pass the bus is a dairy truck
  carrying an advertisement for "Happy Cow Farms".  The slogan along the bottom
  of the box says "Happy Milk from Happy Cows".
  
  The second truck is labelled "Three Nerds and a Geek Piano Movers".  
  Immortalized forever on the side of the box is a picture of myself and three 
  of my friends who contributed ideas and their own sense of humour to this 
  animation.  The people in the pictures are (in order from the front of the 
  truck to the back) Greg, Lee, Byron (myself), and Kevin.  We are still 
  deciding who deserves the distinction of being the geek.
  
  Its not really an easter egg, but in case you missed it...yes, its a big
  hotdog on the back of a truck.


Factoids
~'~'~'~'
  This is my first project using 3D Studio Max and also my first attempt at
  making an animated character.  

  256 MB of disk space was consumed storing 1135 frames (as ppm files).    

  87,168,000 pixels were rendered.

  The MPEG encoding achieved a compression of 70:1.

  Only three cows were injured in the making of this animation.

  
Acknowledgements
~'~'~'~'~'~'~'~'
  Thanks again to Kevin, Lee, and Greg for their ideas and continual 
  interruptions:  "Don't worry about your thesis...How's Melvin?"

  Thanks to the Computer Graphics and Vision Lab (of which I am a member) in
  the Computer Science Department, University of Saskatchewan, for the use of
  their software and hardware.

  The original cow and sedan meshes were obtained from Avalon.
  (http://avalon1.viewpoint.com)

  The original semi tractors (by Jim McInnis) were also obtained from Avalon.

  sPatch was fundamental to this project.  You _need_ this software.
  (http://home.earthlink.net/~mclifton/spatch.html)

  Crossroads was used for converting meshes into 3DS format.
  (http://www.europa.com/~keithr/Crossroads/index.html)

  Paint Shop Pro was used for creating texture maps.  (http://www.jasc.com)


