TITLE: Meteor!
NAME: Tekno Frannansa
COUNTRY: UK
EMAIL: tek@evilsuperbrain.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.evilsuperbrain.com
TOPIC: Force Of Nature
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: meteor.mpg
RENDERER USED: 


        POV-Ray for Windows v3.5



TOOLS USED: 


        POV-Ray editor
        Paint Shop Pro 5
         WorldMachine beta 0.98


RENDER TIME: 

         approx. 7 hours (scene one)
         approx. 2 hours (scene two)



HARDWARE USED: 


        PentiumIII 550MHz 256MB RAM



ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 


"Oh no! A huge meteor is going to hit the planet!!!"

"Oh, maybe not..." :)



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


The fall from space down to a planet surface is something I've wanted to render
for ages. So when I saw this topic I immediately thought of a meteor's eye
view. But then I was stuck for an ending! I considered various ideas over the
next few weeks, including a massive explosion, but none of them really stood
out to me. Then a few weeks before the deadline I suddenly had the idea of
playing a trick with the scale of the meteor.

Time constraints at work meant I haven't put as much time into this image as I
would like. In fact I had decided not to enter because I didn't think I'd have
time to finish it before the deadline! I only changed my mind last week upon
seeing that there only 3 entries so far. Within that time the meteor, smoke,
fire, and the landscape in the second scene were created! I'm very pleased with
the results, the objects don't look realistic but the punchline works well and
still makes me giggle now :)


Anyway, some technical details (skip this bit if you're not interested!):

The animation was created in 3 seperate parts; the first scene, the meteor &
it's trail, and the second scene.

The first scene - the dive to the planet.
This was created quite early on in the round (first version was in august!). The
ground was an isosurface, but was replaced by a sphere with normal map to
improve render times. The atmosphere is a fairly standard media, with density
controlled by an exponential function like real atmospheres. The motion of the
camera was based upon what looked good, no physics were involved.

The meteor & trail
I began this just last week! I knew render times would be a problem (due to me
having a slow PC and not much time to render), so I kept all the elements
simple. The meteor itself is just a blob with an agate pigment used for the
normal. The smoke looks much better than it should, because it just consists of
a lot of discs facing the camera, with normal patterns that make them look like
spheres, and a pigment that fades to transparent at the edges. It really is
that simple, but it looks nearly as good as a media! The fire is the same
trick, but with a different pigment map, and it's own light group to add some
nice highlights. BTW, the first smoke test render of 300 particles took 7
minutes to render 100 frames, so I'll be re-using this in future animations ;)

The second scene - the "impact"
The houses are just simple CSG with a normal map to create the bricks. The land
was knocked up in the superb WorldMachine by Stephen Schmitt, because it really
was the quickest way to get the landscape I needed for my houses. The texturing
on the land is made from a gradient and granite pigment. The sky and distant
landscape is on the sky sphere, to save render times. The final thing I did for
this scene (and possibly the hardest) was create the bouncing animation for the
meteor. It's based on real physics, by solving s=ut+1/2at^2 for the meteor and
every particle of flame, on every frame! It took a while to iron the bugs out
but the result is exactly the movement I wanted.


Finally, I apologise sincerely for not being able to provide source for this
animation. I know it has some techniques in it others will want to use (lets
face it, I mean the smoke) so please feel free to e-mail me and I'll try to
send you some source that's not too messy. Also keep an eye on the pov
newsgroups because when I get time I'll try to write a useable smoke include
file.




