TITLE: Alarm Clock
NAME: Ian Print
COUNTRY: England
EMAIL: ian@escape-from-reality.co.uk
WEBPAGE: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/tirain/
TOPIC: Unnecessarily Complicated Devices
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: ip_alarm.mpg
RENDERER USED: 

    Blender 2.23 and 2.20



TOOLS USED: 

    Digital camera (to get textures), Paintshop Pro 4.15 SE
(for editing textures), Studio DC10+ 1.06 (for putting sound track together),
SoundProbe2 (for recording and editing sounds), TMPGEnc 12a  (to encode the
MPEG) 



CREATION TIME: 

    About 8 hours to render, countless hours to create, countless
more hours trying to stop windows falling to pieces.



HARDWARE USED: 

    466 MHz Celeron, 384 MB.



ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 

It's an alarm clock. Of course it only works on sunny days, but nothing's
perfect is it?
In case you couldn't figure out what was going on in any part of the
animation, here's the sequence of events...

The magifying glass concentrates the sun's rays onto the string. The string
burns and snaps. This releases a plate which has been held down on a spring
by the string (via some pulleys). The plate gets pushed up by the spring
(but is glued on, so it doesn't fly off and break). The apple resting on
the plate is thrown into the air and hits the ruler. The ruler is slotted
through a piece of dowel and pivots when hit by the apple. The ruler hits
the handle of a child's spade, which is pivoting on a cricket stump. The
end of the spade hits a set-square which is pivoting on an iron bar. This
releases the string of a bow and arrow. The arrow (with a sucker on the 
end) hits a target which is attached to a metal rod, supported by two metal
bars with loops. The metal rod slides along through the loops and pushes a
rubber glove attached to the other end onto the switch of a clockwork 
mouse. The clockwork mouse starts up and causes the vinyl record it is 
resting on to turn. (The record rests on a pencil, supported by flower pots,
supported by carboard boxes, and the mouse is attached to the wall by
another metal bar). There are two metal nuts dangling on pieces of string
from the record. As the record turns faster the nuts fly outward and
eventually one of them hits the pair of scissors, causing them to close.
The scissors cut the string holding up a mallet, which pivots on a metal
bar (there's a lot of metal bars in this). The mallet swings down and hits
a cricket ball balanced on a golf tee (which you probably wouldn't notice
unless you freeze the animation). The cricket ball rolls down a drainpipe
and hits a cricket bat. The bat is wedged into the head of a broom which is
attached to the ceiling by a hinge. This keeps the bat upright and stops the
broom from moving. When the cricket ball hits the bat, the bat falls down
and releases the broom which swings back and forth. The two fish nailed to
the ends of the broom head slap the sleeper repeatedly in the face. 
While this slapping is going on the cricket bat falls and hits one end of a
bread knife which is balanced on a rolling pin with an orange on the other
end. The orange is catapulted into the air and lands in a waste paper bin
attached via pieces of string to a coathanger. As the orange in the bin
pulls one end of the coathanger down the other end pivots up pulling another
string, via pulleys, attached to a coffee mug. The mug tips up releasing
marbles into a funnel. The marbles drop from the funnel onto a saucepan
lid making a loud clanging noise, thus helping the sleeper to awake (in case
the fish slapping isn't enough). 



DEDICATION:
This is dedicated to my wife, Rhoda - who is still waiting for me to finish
the bathroom.



VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 

    Windows media player



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


All the modelling, animation, and titling was done in Blender.

I created all the objects myself, except for the head which was exported
from the free version of Poser 3 on a cover magazine. I reshaped it in Blender,
added a UV map of my (slightly rehashed) face and animated it with relative 
vertex keys.

I created nearly all the textures from photos taken with a digital camera, but
one or two things I couldn't find lying around the house and had to resort 
to the internet.

The smoke from the string was done with particles, using the procedural texture
"marble" in the 8th channel in order to vary the direction of the smoke from a 
straight line. I also animated the offset of the marble using an empty in order
to shake the smoke about a bit.

The magnifying glass texture was done using the refraction plug-in made by
Eeshlo.
(Blender is not a ray tracer, and cannot do real refraction or reflection - it
has
to be faked).

The dropping marbles are done with 3 particle emitters with dupliverted spheres
to generated marbles instead of particle halos. One emits from inside the cup
into
the funnel, where they vanish. The second emits from the bottom of the funnel
onto
the pan lid, where they again vanish just before hitting the pan. The third
emits
upwards from the pan lid, with plenty of randomness added for scatter.

I had some major problems with Windows towards the end of this project. I have
two
versions of it on two disks, one very flakey (screwed up registry and all
sorts). 
The good version I managed to mangle by restoring from a backup which failed to
work.
Then neither did the previous backup (not enough memory to start windows my
foot!
Since when did Win98 need more than 384MB to start up?!)
Then I tried my old backups done by Microsoft backup and it said half the files
on
them were corrupted when trying to restore it. Arrgh!
So I had to finish it off using the flakey windows, which of course started
getting
more and more problems the closer I got to finishing - registry errors,
reboots,
GPFs everywhere. Gah. I *hate* windows sometimes! 
Sorry about all that whinging but I just had to get it off my chest!


