TITLE: Invasion
NAME: James D. Craig
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: AzChip@aol.com
WEBPAGE: www.azchip.homestead.com
TOPIC: Alien Invasion
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: invmix.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    RayDream Studio

TOOLS USED: 
    RayDream Studio for modeling and animation, Photoshop for texturing,
AfterEffects to edit clips together and add sound, AVI2VCD to convert to MPEG

CREATION TIME: 
    Probably about 50 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    HP Pavillion, Ensoniq SQ1 keyboard

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 

Just a good, old-fashioned alien flying-saucer attacking earth kind of thing. 
They attack, we fight back.  (In my excitement, I actually rendered about 30
seconds more, including two shots of the President (made in Poser), and more
general Mayhem.  Then I remembered I could only have about 5 MB of file
space....)

A note about the frame around the movie: I couldn't get AVI2MPG to work on this
file for some reason, so I used AVI2VCD, instead.  It has a slightly different
aspect ratio requirement from AVI2MPG, so rather than have the image look
squished, I put it in a frame.  Then, I thought I'd drop in the copyright
notices to fill up the space.

VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 

Enjoy

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 

I've always been into Sci-Fi, so when the topic was announced, I jumped at it. 
I'm going to describe how the animation was created only by bringing up
particular challenges I faced.  If I don't talk about it here, it probably
wasn't anything out-of-the-ordinary.  But if I don't mention something in
particular, please feel free to ask!

The first thing I did was build all the models -- the alien saucer fighter, the
earth jet fighter (using an excellent model by Viewpoint Labs for reference),
the explosion clouds, the cityscape, the building we see in closeup, the street
scene (which actually was the first model I put together for the project), the
various terrains, the nuclear missile, the earth and the mothership.  Then it
was just a matter of placing the objects in 3-d space and animating them.

Shot 1:  Biggest challenge was to animate the off-screen light to simulate an
explosion we don't see.  Not particularly difficult, but challenging to get the
timing right.

Shot 2:  The building is made of several cubes with the windows removed by
boolean extraction.  The top two floors were exploded using the "explode"
deformer in RayDream.  The trees in the foreground are stock objects that came
with RayDream Studio.  The fireball is made of several metaball objects which
were atomized and then subdivided to provide a rounded, cloud-like surface. 
The shader has several procedural components in the glow channel, primarily
consisting of a marble surface and a color.  The billowing effect is created by
rotating the various metaballs and changing their scale and position.  This
shot took forEVER to render because of the thousands of polygons the upper two
floors broke up into during the explosion.  The bright glow effect is a
RayDream effect called 3D-Aura.  I applied it to virtually every shot to make
the fire look more real.

Shot 3:  (Actually the first shot I created in this sequence).  Nothing new here
except putting a particle fountain in the explosion.  That made for the pretty
sparkies.

Shot 4:  The exhaust trail of the missile was a spline object with a glowing
shader.  The trail was morphed and deformed with a wave deformer to make it
move.  I hung a light alongside the rocket so it would illuminate the body of
the jet as it launched away.

Shot 5:  Same techniques, just moving the camera around the action to increase
the excitement.

Shot 6:  The Smoke clouds are the same idea as the explosion's clouds, just not
as bright a value in the glow channel.  The flame from the missile uses the
same technique as shot 4.  The black smoke is a cloud object confined to a
cylinder shape and attached to the missile and flame.

Shot 7:  Earth is a sphere mapped with NASA images.  The exhaust in this shot is
more vaprous because we're out of the atmosphere; it's a fog-object animated at
a high speed.

Shot 8:  The shockwave from the nuke is just a sphere with a glowing shader and
100% transparency.  The glow value is changed over the first second of the shot
so it vanishes.  The flame clouds are the same technique as above.  I applied
the explode deformer to the center section of the mother ship.  This shot also
took a long time to render.  

Sound:  I know that sound is not considered in this competition, but they say
sound is half the picture....  So, I composed and performed the music score on
my very old Ensoniq keyboard.  The sound effects come from various Sound
Effects CD's.  I do feel the sound enhances the experience; the final explosion
feels much bigger when you hear the individual explosions going off. 
AfterEffects isn't exactly the best sound editing program around, but it did
the job.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy (or enjoyed) the clip....

