TITLE: Nanorobots
NAME: William de Beaumont
EMAIL: amdebe1@ulster.net
TOPIC: Robot
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: nano.mpg
ZIPFILE: nano.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    cmpeg, DOS editor

HARDWARE USED: 
    Celeron 300A w/64MB (sometimes overclocked to 374)

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 

        You begin by looking around and eventually through a microscope to
a bunch of marching nanorobots. The one on the end looks up at you and the 
camera zooms in. The scene fades as you look outside the microscope again and
see the robot that made the nanorobots in its image. It's startled that the
nanorobot is looking up at it. It thinks and looks over its shoulder, half 
expecting to see a microscope lense. It stares, then looks sideways down and
shakes its head, thinking "no, that's silly."


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 

        I'm not really describing the whole process here. I noticed that my
last animation looked very jerky when it came to changing the motion of the
camera. I think I solved that problem in this one. I noticed that when you
square something in the range from 0 to 1 (like the clock variable), it stays 
in that range. The only difference is the place in that range. I made 3 very
useful formulas for making smooth starts and stops, and I have ASCII curves
for them:
 clock*clock:
^        |
o        /
u       /
t ---/
 clock--->
 (smooth start)

 1-(1-clock)*(1-clock)
^     /---
o  /      
u /      
t |
 clock--->
 (smooth stop)

 (1-clock)*clock
^   /-\---------.25      
o /     \    
u |     |   
t |     |
 clock--->
 (smooth peak)

I think they helped alot in making my animation smoother and more natural.

