TITLE: Inside Hut Six
NAME: David Thompson
COUNTRY: Australia
EMAIL: drthompson@iname.com
WEBPAGE: Coming Soon! (will advise in comments)
TOPIC: Inner Workings
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: 6a.mpg
ZIPFILE: 6a.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POVray 3.1g.watcom

TOOLS USED: 

        Moray 3.2 for modelling, texturing and positioning
        Corel Draw 6 to create image maps
        Microsoft Photo Editor 97 to crop and smooth bitmaps
        Paint Shop Pro 5.02 to adjust material map palettes and create
        the movie poster
        Anvil Studio to compose the backing music
        Asymetrix Digital Video Producer to combine the animation frames
        and music into an .avi file, and to add the fades in and out
        avi2mpg1 1.7 to create the .mpg file
        Notepad to write this

CREATION TIME: 

        Pretty much the whole 3 months.
        Rendering took 7 days 8 hours, MPEG conversion took 3 hours.

HARDWARE USED: 
    PII 266 64Mb RAM

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 

        The animation begins by approaching what appears to be a tiny
        hut in a snow-covered wasteland. We soon find out that the hut
        is merely an entrance to a vast underground complex containing
        things no-one would normally see. After observing some of the
        inner workings of the complex, and while waiting for the door 
        to the next section to open, we look back up towards the red
        glow of the hut that seemed to contain so little.

        The animation contains some "familiar faces" - see how many you
        recognise, and how many of each appear (answers below).

VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 

        Media Player 6.4 works fine.
        Parts of the animation are a little bit dark, so its best viewed
        in full screen mode. Otherwise, make sure anything else on the
        screen is fairly dark - viewing on a white background makes it
        hard to see. A True Color display is also fairly important.
        You should probably mute the sound too, since its not part of
        the competition.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 

        WHAT'S BEEN REUSED
         - Many of the textures are based on the ones that come with
           Moray (which are similar to some that come with POVray).
         - The animation macros I developed for the Creatures round
           (drtfrog.mpg) have been rewritten and reused.
         - The idea to model R2D2 and VINcent came to me during the 
           robots round, although I only got as far as a poorly modeled
           top of VINcent's head, which I didn't use for this round. My
           robots idea also had them in a different setting.
         - The designs of the robots in the scene in the scene are
           obviously not all mine:
         - R2D2 (3) is from "Star Wars" (of course). I used
           the videos, a "Return of the Jedi" book, a colouring
           book, a Mastering 3D Graphics tutorial, and various
           toys (including original star wars R2D2 figurines) as
           source material.
         - VINcent (2) is from "The Black Hole". I referred to
           old colouring and sticker activity books. I would have
           liked to include Old BOB or Maximillion, but I didn't
           get time.
         - The red robot (3) ("UnknownRobot" in the source) is
           from a cartoon called "Star Blazers" that used to be 
           on ABC here in Australia. It was one of those cartoons
           that had been dubbed over in English. The hero was
           Derek Wildstar, the first big villian was the blue
           skinned Deslock, but I cannot remember the robot's
           name. I modeled it on a wind up toy.
         - The walking robot (2) ("KongBot" in the source) is
           another plastic wind-up toy.
         - The Lego mover (2) is based on the one that is part of
           "6893 Orion 2 Hyperspace Shuttle", which is new for
           1987 (available in October). I don't have one, but I
           do have a catalog.
         - The Engines are something like those found in the
           Vampire jet fighter (but the model isn't very accurate)
         - The Missiles are loosely based on the GBU-15 CWW
           (Cruciform Wing Weapon) used on the Vought A-7 Corsair
           II for stand-off attack.
        WHAT'S NEW
        Everything else was created especially for this animation round.
        Original robot designs were:
         - The fast moving Buggy (2)
         - The tracked transporter (3)
         - The tank (2) 
        CREATING THE ANIMATION
        Each of the three scenes (approaching, entering, and exploring
        the hut) were first modeled in Moray, with moving objects in
        their starting positions. The POV output from Moray was then
        combined with my animation macros to animate the scenes. Moving
        the objects in Moray, and using macros that showed curve paths
        in a scene, helped to fine tune the animation. Once everything
        moved alright, Moray was used to create fully textured scenes,
        and its POV output was combined with the animation code. Minor
        fixes were made to the final POVray version as defects became
        apparent from each rendering.
        LARGELY IRRELEVANT FACT
        Hut 6 at Bletchley Park is where the English worked on finding
        the daily keys to decrypt the German WWII land-based ENIGMA
        ciphers. The construction of the ENIGMA machine itself was
        first determined by Polish mathematicians some years before
        the war. The daily keys for the more complex Naval and Abwehr 
        versions of ENIGMA were studied in Huts 8 and 12.

