TITLE: Perpetual Robo-regulator
NAME: Ed Brannin
COUNTRY: Rochester, New York (State, NOT City), USA
EMAIL: brannins@hotmail.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.idrive.com/brannins/Web/Ray.html
TOPIC: Robots
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: perpetul.mpg
ZIPFILE: perpetul.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray v3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    CMPEG for MPG, Adobe PhotoDeluxe (came with my Scanner) for the
Poster.

CREATION TIME: 
    about an hour to render + 2.5 minutes to MPG-encode.

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD K6-2 300, 128MB RAM
             & AMD K6-2 233, 96 MB RAM
             & a Zip Drive ;)


ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 

In the year 2361, the Philsopher's Stone of Physics is finally created:
  the Perpetual Motion Machine.
One of the problems that prevented the accomplishment in preceeding
  centuries was the lack of technology capable of monitoring and controlling
  a near-infinite number of reactions and respond to correct minute variances
  much faster than a human could even detect them.
The robot of our scene, a floating chrome sphere, flies around the critical
  point of the apparatus as it scans and manipulates with its purple
beam-thing.
The plasmaball is the perpetually accelerated - and generated - object.  While
  it isn't big enough for much practical use, it's firmly in place as a
prototype.

This is my first entry into the IRTC, and my second distinct animation.  I like
  rendering objects that move on mathematical paths, such as the trig
functions.



VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 

Best viewed at your system's Highest color depth.  (TrueColor / 32-bit)
I look at this with the default Windows Media Player.
This is a cyclic animation, so I suggest setting loops
(times played) to infinite, or at least anything above 1.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 

I used POV-Ray to make all of the frames, with the spheres' X & Z coords
being in "Trig form" notation (cos q, sin q), and the ball's Y is an
Absolute Cosine curve  Y = abs(cos(radians(Angle)))  .

The main platform is a cylinder, and the thing sticking up in the middle is a
CSG
  Merged Cylinder + Sphere - I never could figure out just why the cylinder
part
  stands out so much against the spherical part.
There are two spheres, one with a cylinder going to the middle thing, and the
other
  being at one end of a cone, also going into the middle.

