TITLE: Ducky_s Bg Adventure
NAME: Gerald P. Singelmann
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: gsingelm@t-online.de
TOPIC: Adventure
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: ducky.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Ray Dream Studio

TOOLS USED: 
    Ray Dream Studio, Premiere, Photoshop, movie2MPEG

CREATION TIME: 
    looooong (does anyone actually count the hours?)

HARDWARE USED: 
    Mac G4/400

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 
    the biggest adventures of all the ones you have as a
child...


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
    as usual with MPEGs mixed on my mac, some scenes might
be too dark. i still have found no good way to prevent this

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 

i could not resist the beginning <smile> ... the white circles are actually 3D
objects with a very high glow setting. (i find it easier animating in ray dream
than in any other (unknown) programm)
i spent the first 4-7 weeks trying to get water and grass right. the grass is
made using the furrific extension to ray dream. some days i was not too
systematic and afterwards could not remember how the rather good results were
reached. bugger. how do you organize your experiments, folks?
the duck is my first succesful attempt at using the
not-exactly-professional-standard mesh editor of ray dream. at last i believe
that you *can* do things in there. (the spline editor on the other hand is
fun)
the collision detection of ray dream is too inferior to prevent the water
growing through the leaf under the frog. i had to retouch frame by frame in
photoshop.
there is no motion blur in ray dream, so the flight was single-frame-edited as
well.
i found my web-cam an invaluable help in getting the timing right: how fast do
you move when you get startled? how fast should the wings move when a duck is
in a hurry? and so on. 60 bucks well spent.
after i was almost finished (yesterday ;) i noticed, that the _message_ of the
film is not what i intended. so i had to put in the last, small render. i would
have liked to elaborate, but i still think it somehow works.

this was fun, again. 
thanks for the opportunity (and the deadline / pressure) to be creative and
finish something 
I am looking forward to see what you other guys come up with :)

