TITLE: Frontiers
NAME: Caleb Hines
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: bachmusic1@netscape.net
WEBPAGE: N/A
TOPIC: Travelling
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: frntiers.mpg
ZIPFILE: frntiers.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    MegaPOV 1.0/POV-Ray 3.5


TOOLS USED: 

Wilber, Terragen, and GIMP for the heightfield on Earth.
Chris Colefax's Galaxy include file
(http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/1434/galaxy.html).
Rune's Particle System for the campfire
(http://runevision.com/3d/include/particles/particles.asp).
pjBmp2Avi and TMPGEnc for encoding the animation.


CREATION TIME: 

  (hr:min:sec)
  Scene1 (996 frames): 10:37:26
  Scene2 (480 frames):  4:39:37 *
  Scene3 (600 frames):  3:51:53 *
  Scene4 (432 frames):  ?:??:?? +
  Scene5 (480 frames): 11:10:16

  * Scenes 2 & 3 were rendered concurently on the same machine. One using
MegaPOV, the other in POVRay.

  + I had originaly planned to rerender this, then decided not to. It took < 5
hrs (probably < 4).


HARDWARE USED: 
    900 MHz Pentium 3 + Windows ME


ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 


Space -- the Final Frontier. My original thought for travelling was spaceships,
but that seemed to cliched, so I thought of other options. One that came to
mind was a wagon train, which made me think of the quote "Hitch your wagon to a
star" and allowed me to tie the concept of space travel with wagons. We start
with the wagons on the praries of the early American Frontier, and then
symbolically jump to the future where mankind colonizes the frontier of space.

Overall, I'm happy with the results, but I wish I had had the time to go back
and move the camera a bit in scenes 2 through 4.



VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 


I started out on my 17" CRT monitor, then for Christmas, I bought myself a 19"
LCD which was somewhat brighter. As a result, it may seem to bright for a night
scene on some monitors and too dark on others. As with most animations, I like
to watch it in the dark.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


I started by modelling the wagons. Most of it is simple CSG, but the canvas on
top is another story. The frontal cross-section shape of the canvas is formed
by two splines (outer and inner). I then wrote a loop to create a mesh which
extrudes the spline and displaces it's vertices according to a function of the
form -abs(sin())*normal_vector to create the droopy parts. There were other
places where sin curves came in handy as well. It took so long to draw the
wagons though, that I put the mesh-generating algorithm into a seperate file,
and wrote the resulting mesh to a third file, which I then included. That sped
things up quite a bit.

For the campfire file, I wrote another algorithm (albeit a rather poor one) to
stack the logs in a conical pile. I tried a couple different random seeds
before I got one that looked right. And I used Rune's particle system for the
actual flame.

The heightfiled was rather troublesome, as I kept getting shadows from the low
firelight where it hit a step in the heightfield. Also, I wanted to avoid the
appearence of the wheels dipping to far into the ground. Eventually, I just
used the GIMP to smooth out the section of interest.

I spent a few months on and off fine tuning the first scene (The campfire slowed
rendering way down), and then realized at the end of December that I'd better
get a move on if I'd hoped to submit it on time. Scenes 2, 3, and 4 fell into
place within a couple weeks. Scene 2 actually gave me a bit of trouble with
lighting and path. I hd wanted to use Chris' lens flare file to create a
sunrise, but I wouldn't have been able to illuminate the wagons properly. In
order to finish these scenes so quickly, I had to forego moving the camera.
Moving cameras still take me a bit of time to work out the path. This is my
biggest regret with the animation.

Unfortunately, I don't remember where I downloaded the planet textures from
(they've been sitting on my hard drive accumulating dust for several years
now).

I needed to add scene 5 to have a proper conclusion. The surface is an
isosurface (rather than a heightfield which gave me problems in scene 1). The
rocks are spherical isofunctions with noise and random scaling, rotation, and
translation. Matching the color of Mars was tricky (I eventually downloaded a
picture from NASA), but I think I got it close enough. Ironically, despite slow
isosurfaces and a moving camera, I finished the scene in a few days, and its
even my favorite scene!

Converting to mpeg was another challenge. I first used pjBmp2Avi to convert to
an uncompressed (~660MB!) avi file, and was going to use avi2mpg1 to finish the
conversion, but the resulting mpeg had a wacky color shift (r->g, g->b, b->r),
and the alignment was off so that the right edge of the animation was shifted
to the left side of the viewing area. I surfed the web, and found that tmpgenc
was the encoder of choice among most irtc anim entries, so I downloaded and
used that on the avi (which cut the size down to <3MB!).

