TITLE: That's Life
NAME: Peter Dolan
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: pdolan@jps.net
WEBPAGE: www.jps.net/bdolan/
TOPIC: Life
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: fishlife.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    3D Studio Max R3 default renderer

TOOLS USED: 

        Photoshop 5.0 -- mapping
        3D Studio Max R3 -- modeling/animation
        Adobe Premier 5.0 -- compiling of still images
        AVI2MPG1 -- conversion to MPEG

CREATION TIME: 
    about 3 days

HARDWARE USED: 
    PIII500, 128MB RAM, W98

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 

        The life of a fish
        1st scene: swimming in circles
        2nd scene: swimming in circles
        3rd scene: highlight of the day (paper gets blown in the breeze)
        4th scene: swimming in circles
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATIONS WA CREATED:

I started with a picture of a fish from the internet, from there I modeled the
fish body using surface tools (splines), and the fins using NURBS surfaces, the
bump/color/specularity maps were drawn in Photoshop with the original picture
as a guide.  The fins were mapped using a gradient to define color and
transparency based on how "elevated" the surface was from "zero height." 
Animation was done primarily with block controllers until I discovered that
they tended to make my computer lock up (every 10 minutes or so... gets
annoying to say the least) and the movement to do weird stuff, and so I
resorted to the standard copy-paste of keyframes.  I'm especially pleased with
the lighting in the scene -- I'm happy that the "radiosity" lights (behind the
walls, shadowless) worked so well to provide a daylight atmosphere.  I was
originally going to have the fishbowl refract as well as reflect, but I
realized that I wasn't patient enough to render 1427 frames at 10 minutes a
frame! :)

Dedicated to Rachel, thank you.

VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 

        Don't fall asleep, I use standard windows media player in fullscreen
mode

