TITLE: That's Impossible
NAME: Joe Wise
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: joewise@telocity.com
TOPIC: Inner Workings
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: h20fall.mpg
ZIPFILE: h20fall.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.1g

TOOLS USED: 
    Povray text editor, Wilbur, mpeg2encode

CREATION TIME: 
    Alot

HARDWARE USED: 
    Several Pentium Class machines

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 
    This is my interpretation of the inner workings of the
still
lithograph, "Waterfall" by M.C. Escher.

VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
    Windows media player seems to work fine.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 
    I started by building the still
based
strictly on M.C. Escher's original lithograph, "Waterfall."  The major
difference is that
I didn't include people and I changed the background.

First of all, the problem of perspective needed to be tackled.  Because of the
way I 
constructed the scene, perspective needs to be eliminated so that everything in
frame is
in the same scale, i.e., objects which are the same size and located at
different distances 
from the camera need to appear the same size.  That can be done with povray, by
using an
orthographic camera, but I wanted perspective for the rest of the animation. 
You can also
eliminate perspective by making objects larger as their distance from the camera
increases.
That seemed really difficult to me so I decided for a third approach.  I
approximated the 
elimination of perspective by placing the camera very far away with a very low
viewing 
angle.   Then, for the animation, I bring the camera in rapidly and expand the
viewing 
angle.

The ground is actually the Grand Canyon.  I converted a DEM of the grand canyon
into a tga
for the height field using wilbur.  I'm pretty sure it's not scaled correctly,
but the
resolution of DEM becomes unacceptable with any more scaling.

I didn't include full code for this scene for various reasons, however, in the
spirit of
the competition, I tried to include all of the non-trivial code, such as how I
tackled the
camera problems for the first zoom in and last zoom out.  I also included the
code for the
waterfall, which I think could be a decent waterfall with some tweaking. 
Additionally I included
the code for the camera path, which is adapted from a spline path method I found
in a book
called "Making Movies On Your PC" by David K. Mason and Alexander Enzmann,
copyright 1993.
I found this method to be VERY useful.  It's the only unoriginal code in the
scene, and,
regrettably, I can't comment on it, as I don't fully understand how it works. 
However, 
I tried to make the code more of a discussion so maybe it'll help somebody out
there.

If you have any questions feel free to email me.  Try any of the following email
addresses
(I don't know which will be around the longest, so I just included them all)
joewise@telocity.com
joewise@mymoneymentor.com
wisej@nationwide.com

So, I hope you enjoy this animation.  Bet you can't watch it just once.

