TITLE: Stormy Weather
NAME: Karl Manning
COUNTRY: England
EMAIL: karl@pemail.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.yi.com/home/ManningKarl
TOPIC: Transportation
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: storm.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray V3.02 (Windows 95)

TOOLS USED: 


Spatch 1.5
PaintShop Pro 4.14
MainActor 1.5 to produce the MPEG, and preview the animation
Lots of paper, pencils


CREATION TIME: 

Approx 5 hours rendering
Approx 2 hours to convert to MPEG


HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 133 32Mb memory


ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 

A cutter-style sailing ship carves across the ocean driven by an increasing
wind. A storm develops, rages and fades. The ship sails on.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 

The animation was split into 3 main areas. 

The first was the background clouds. The sky is a box. This was done because the
texture distorted badly when mapped onto a sphere. The texture is a simple bozo
texture scaled in the x-direction, with a filter value and colour scheme that
changes with the clock. The main "sun" light is outside this box, and so the
image gets darker as the storm develops.

The lightning is a long, thin box with a marble texture on it. The colour map
and the scaling were carefully chosen so that only one vein of marble is
visible. This fragment was scaled and rotated to give all the forks of
lightning. The lightning object was displayed at random, and also rotated in
the z-direction by a slight random amount. A white light was attached to the
lightning object.

The sea was created in two stages - a simple POV file was used to generate 10
files using a ripple texture on a plane, with the phase altering with the
clock. The files were "cleaned" in Paintshop Pro, then used as heightfield
within the main animation. They were scaled by differing amounts to make the
waves build up in height and then die away.

The ship model comes in two parts. The first is a very basic brown box with 3
cylinders on it which was used for testing the positioning and movement of the
ship and waves. As it was simple it meant I could produce test renderings in a
reasonable time !

The main ship hull was modelled in Spatch. Originally the whole ship was
modelled in Spatch, however it was taking longer to parse it than it was render
! The masts, spars and rigging were converted into cones and cylinders instead
of bicubics.

I also ended up ditching the sails as modelled in Spatch as they were impossible
to animate, in fact due to the volume of data they were quite difficult to find
at all !

I built a sheet, made up of 9 bi-cubics, by hand, based on some of the
coordinates generated by Spatch. These had variables built into them. The
variables are decreased, or increased depending on the clock position, so the
sails fold up or unfold as needed.

And that's all I have time for....


Karl Manning
karl@pemail.net

2/4/98






