TITLE: Team Beanie
NAME: Cory Nichol
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: cnichol@magma.ca
TOPIC: Robot
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: cn_team.mpg
ZIPFILE: cn_team.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    povray 3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray, cmpeg

CREATION TIME: 
    6.5 Hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium III 550

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 

This animation show 2 groups of 6 robots working away, using gears
to combine their efforts. When the camera pulls back, you see that
all that effort is to turn the propeller on the top of the large
robot's beanie. 

VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 

Windows Media Player did an OK job.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 

This topic sparked my interest. I have never submitted anything 
to either the stills or the animation competition. I had this idea
to have a bunch of small robots working away inside a large robot.
Later, I came up with the idea of making them doing something 
trivial (turning the propeller).

I am actually quite pleased how much programming is in the pov
scene descriptions for my animation. The whole animation (except
the title) can be rendered from the main.ini. 


Each robot was created in Moray. 

Robot1 (on the crank) was the toughest. The motion of the arms took
a very long time to get correct. Take a look at the source. I had to 
use the Law of Cosines to get the degrees to bend the elbow. 

Robot2 (tank guy pushing axle) was also an exercise in math. I wanted
to make sure that the tread moved the same amount as the floor under
the robot. But the code I made is now fairly portable. The tread could 
be added to any scene, and made to work on any device.

Robot3 (big guy wearing the hat) is the simplest one. He just smiles at   
the end. 

The gears were created from a base include file created by Marc Schimmler.
However, the base gears are a little plain, so I put them in a CSG to add
some detail.

The bridge is almost pure code. I was unhappy with the robots being
directly on the floor. Besides, if the hat was lifted off, then the robots
should be on a structure that obviously goes with the hat. 

The path that the camera takes was coded as an include file. This allowed
me to test he camera path by rendering an animation with a sphere at the
camera location and another sphere at the camera look position. This 
allowed me to make sure that the motion was smooth. campath1 was the file
used. campath was first attempt. But the camera moved too much, and made
the animation far too large.

I have included the source code for the whole animation.. 

Comments would be appreciated.

