TITLE: Highnoon
NAME: Tim Nikias Wenclawiak, aka "Tim Nikias v2.0"
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: LOWERCASEONLYtimNOTnikias(At)gmx.netWARE
WEBPAGE: http://www.nolights.de

TOPIC: Duel
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: tw_1200.mpg
ZIPFILE: tw_1200.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.6.1 for Windows


TOOLS USED: 
    TMpgEnc for Encoding the MPEG-1 file, PSP7 for the subtitle-images
(which were added in POV-Ray, no post-processing used on entire short)


CREATION TIME: 
    roughly 40 days


HARDWARE USED: 
    2.8GHz Athlon XP, 786 MB DDR-RAM


ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 


A Jet and an UFO duel for the future of the earth: the winner keeps it!


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
    Should work fine on any player, it's a standard MPEG1
after all. Fullscreen might be nice. :)


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


1. The idea and concept

To begin with, I did a brainstorming session on what could actually be duelling
each other. As I didn't have any macros or scripts prepared for animations to
time things, everything had to be scripted on the go. Thus I came to the most
basic items to be animated: models that have near to no moving parts and won't
require animation to move them about. Flying planes was the obvious choice.

2. Modelling phase

I created all models and scenes from scratch, though several of my older Macros
were used to aid in that process, most of all my Mesh-Modelling-Macros and
BSplines-Include-File. I sketched and designed both Jet and UFO on paper before
attempting to model them using CSG and meshes. Keep in mind that everything
(aside the encoding to MPEG) was done using ONLY POV-Ray for Windows' Editor,
all meshes were constructed using older as well as new and specially scripted
macros inside POV-Ray.
I didn't want to have a standard black background for some kind of galactic
fight, and a simple ground-plane doesn't look too sophisticated. Thus I created
a simple backdrop which doesn't take too long to render: The mountain-range in
the distance is a heightfield, the clouds are just five textured and layered
spheres that throw shadows on each other, faking a volumetric effect.
Both UFO and Jet were constructed with few variables to be set. The jet's
propulsion and the amount of the missiles under the wings can be set, the UFO
allows different types of conditions and texturing, additionally, as the meshes
required for the UFO are quite large, I created a low-poly version for the
preview renders.

3. Preproduction

During the modelling of the objects I've also begun preproduction, namely
writing the macros required to animate the objects and test the effects. The
explosion caused by the missiles, as well as those caused by the plasma-ball
were rendered dozens of times during the hours in which I wasn't actually at
the PC, as rendering these required quite some processing power. The explosion
uses a technique common to 3D-games: the particles aren't true volumetric
spheres, but rather textured and cleverly lit half-spheres. Only the
orange/red-glow was made using POV-Ray's media. The plasma-explosion, however,
is 100% media with somewhat around 25 large particles.
During preproduction I've also modified my Glare-Macros in order to use them to
project subtitles onto the viewing screen, as well as made use of the
Glare-Macros themselves to create the blinding highlight in the scene where the
UFO goes into horizontal flight, so, no post-processing in this short! :-)
The title and my name in the first shot are actually layered behind the clouds
as to receive shadows. The other subtitles were ambient-lit and stayed
unaffected of the lighting.
I also needed to experiment on the heat-haze effect visible in the scene with
the radar-dish. I intended to use the distortion effect on a few more
occasions, but didn't find enough time to do the testing, so it remained a
special effect for this single shot.

4. Animation

During the production of the short I've implemented various macros to ease the
handling. Some simple timers allowed me to just set a beginning second and an
end-second, and the macros would take care of returning a value between 0 and 1
as I find that the most intuitive. I've also implemented a Shaky-Cam-Macro,
which took care of all the subtle - and on occasions, obvious - camera
movements. The macro wasn't done until the fourth or fifth scene, and it is
obvious that I got more experienced with it towards the end. Still, the
deadline didn't permit redoing the first scenes.
What I'd basically do for animation is brainstorm on the action taking place,
sketch a small storyboard and, using my vivid imagination, visualize the scenes
in succession. I'd also throw some of my DVDs into the drive and watch certain
parts of movies to get ideas on where to position the camera and how to animate
it.
Having no experience with animations so far (except for several tech-demos on my
website, but you can hardly call that animation) I sometimes found it difficult
to achieve the smooth motion I envisioned. In the scene where the Jet evades
the plasma-ball I wanted it to do a barrel-roll, but the animation looked so
jerky that I decided against it. I've given thought to implementing a script
which would, rather than animating the jet directly using keyframes, use input
values to physically animate the jet, with banking and all. Again, time didn't
permit for that endeavor.
Difficulties arose when the movement of the objects exceeded the actual size of
the desert-set, e.g. when the UFO tries to outrun the missile, it would pass
the clouds, or on certain shots the objects were placed almost on the
mountain-range. To avoid this issue I've soon come up with an animated texture
which is placed on a disc at the center of the set. The objects were then just
positioned above it, and the animation of the texture conveys the image of a
moving jet or UFO.

5. Issues during rendering

The meshes for the UFO were 16MB in size, especially the battered hull at the
end required a highly detailed model. Generating the meshes on the fly during
rendering was no option as some of them required well over a minute for parsing
alone. Would I have had to add 2 minutes parsing time per picture, the
animation would never have been completed in time. Thus, the meshes were
generated in a seperate file and then saved to disk. Still, loading such large
meshes requires a few seconds.
Another problem arose when using too many particles. POV-Ray only allows to
stack 100 objects into each other, the particle amount in some scenes easily
exceeded that limit! I resorted to using less particles with less transparency,
more turbulenced textures and larger in size.

6. Final Notes

Time-Constraints kept me from redoing the first shots to match the style and
dynamics of the later scenes, and I would have added a few more distortion
effects, namely as an add-on to the plasma-charging, if I had started earlier
and thus, had more time. Sometimes I was a little too ambitious and then had to
cut a scene into two parts, as doing it in one take increased the complexity
for animation exponentially. I do think though that I managed to hide that
pretty well by doing very dynamic shots which required a cut in any case (like
the camera zooming in on the missile hitting the UFO).
In the end, I'm quite satisfied with what I was able to pull off, given the late
start and no experience.

Hope all this text helps future contestants to render an entry of their own!
:-)

Regards,
Tim Nikias v2.0

