EMAIL: virtu@iki.fi
NAME: Virtu Halttunen and Steve Jackson
TOPIC: Force of Nature
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Strange Eons
COUNTRY: Finland, USA
WEBPAGE:
RENDERER USED: MegaPOV 3.5 Alpha for Macintosh
TOOLS USED: Graphic Converter, Graphing Calculator, Movie2MPEG, FFMpegX,
pencils and paper, caffeine
CREATION TIME: About three weeks to build, circa 1400 hours to render
HARDWARE USED: 17 PowerMac G4s
VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: A computer and some kind of display will help
ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:
For a brief moment, Mankind dominated the planet, shaping it as it saw
fit, tearing down forests and building cities, polluting the water and
the skies. Now it was gone, leaving behind its creations as a monument
of its days of glory. But nature is never still, and soon the wind, the
rain, and the snow had wiped away most of the scars the Man had caused,
and in but a few moments more, continents pushing into each other,
mountains rose, and eaten by erosion, fell down again. What had seemed
dead or dying was alive once more, for life itself was a force of
nature, and had merely been sleeping and biding its time.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:
This is our first IRTC entry, and we feel some acknowledgments are in
order here. The city is created using a slightly modified version of
Chris Colefax's city include file, and the night sky is created with his
galaxy include. The dead tree in the beginning and the living one at the
end are made with a modified version of Gilles Tran's tree macro. It is
unlikely that the animation would even exist without the help of the
works of these two POV-ray giants.

The animation first started with the idea of using isosurfaces to create
an animated terrain, simulating plate tectonics and erosion. We came up
with a small story, drew some storyboards to go with it, and started
working on the animation.

The terrain is made with isosurfaces, using a black and white bozo
pattern as the function. The pattern is built by a loop that uses a
fifth degree polynomial function to distribute the black and white. This
allows for highly customizable colour map, if you know what you are
doing. Two isosurface functions are blended to create the transitions
between different landscapes.  The glacier is formed with a similar
technique, although it is not as complex.

The next task was animating the tree and the city. This required certain
changes to the macro files used, since neither file was prepared for
such abuse. Mostly the changes involve declaring random variables before
using them, so we can have a different number of objects between frames
without the random number sequences going out of line.

The terrain textures use slopes to distribute the vegetation and snow on
the low lands and rock on the steeper surfaces. We are not completely
happy about the sub-textures and especially the transitions from one
texture to another, but we started running out of time. (It didn't
particularly help that Virtu had to leave country for a week-long work
trip three weeks before the animation deadline.) For this reason we
never had the chance to try out some of our ideas, such as animating the
lights during the night or adding more details like roads around the
city.

The intro and outro sequences were also made completely in POV. Box and
text objects were placed very close to the camera, and faded in and out
with transparency.

The combination of rather complex isosurface functions and sloped
textures made the scene quite slow to render. At one point we estimated
that the whole 720-frame animation would take a single 700+ MHz PowerMac
G4 over 200 days to render completely. Enter our friend Sterling Strait,
who kindly donated his time and the computer lab he is in charge of to
our cause.  With his help, there have been as many as 17 PowerMac G4s
rendering frames for the project at a time. Even with this array of
computers, it ended up being a rather close shave, leaving us no time to
fix certain errors that came up with the glacier and the city.

Going from images to movie required a several-step process: Graphic
Converter was used to string the frames into a quicktime movie,
Movie2MPEG was used to make this into a high-quality MPEG, and FFMpegX
0.0.4d was used for final compression.  Our choice to use a larger
resolution forced us to use fairly high compression, and many
compression trials were required to find the "perfect" compression.