TITLE: Duel for Eternity
NAME: Steve Shelby
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: sshelby@shelbyvision.com
TOPIC: Duel
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: longduel.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    Povray 3.5, Moray 3.5, and Videomach

CREATION TIME: 
    Total render time was about 2 hours. Total time spent on the
project was about 60 hours.

HARDWARE USED: 
    2Ghz Pentium4, 256Mb

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 
    The eternal struggle of good and evil.


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
    Any will do.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 
    I was originally inspired by an
entry in the Jan. 2004 IRTC Animation Competion called "The End of good and
Evil" by William de Beaumont. I wanted to represent the yin and yang in a three
dimensional way. I didn't arrive at the final concept until about mid
September, so I didn't get to refine it as much as I would have liked. Much
credit has to go to Chris Colefax, for his great Povray tools: spline macro,
and autoclock macro, without which I would not have been able to proceed.
The two worms are pipe splines, using the spline macro. I spent many hours
plotting their points on graph paper, getting it wrong, trying again, etc.,
until I finally got it right. each spline has 18 points, each of which get
translated many times, which taxed my little brain to its limit. I used Povray
for everything, except a few times I used Moray to help with getting a texture
right and experimenting with the fog. The plane in the scene has a simple white
texture with normal wrinkles, and diffuse 1, specular 0.1, brilliance 5. It is
overlaid by a thin layer of thick ground fog. I had first experimented with
media for this, but it made render times so slow that I never would have gotten
it done in time. I'm happy with the way it turned out; it has the etherial
cloud-like quality I was going for. 


