TITLE: RTDR-1
NAME: John D. Gwinner
COUNTRY: United States of America
EMAIL: john.gwinner@cornell.edu
WEBPAGE: www.bigonmars.com
TOPIC: Travelling
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT 2005, John
MPGFILE: rtdr1.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POVRay 3.5 (MegaPOV 1.1)

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray, PoseRay, Poser 5, World Machine, Leveller, VirtualDub,
TMPGEnc, pjBmp2Avi, Audacity, Moray Domes plugin, M.O.P.S.

CREATION TIME: 
    months ! which shows pretty low productivity

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon Thunderbird, 2.0875 Ghz.

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 


_When traveling on Mars, you need to carry your own air, water, and food. 
Vehicles tend to be big.

Two Drillers are returning after drilling for water in Tithonium Chasma, in
Valles Marineris._

They are driving a Rough Terrain Drilling Rig (RTDR).  Note the animation has
sound, although it stands alone without it.


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 

It does have sound, but the sound is background.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


This is my first IRTC submission, and I found I had a hard time getting
everything together.  This animation shows a tank tread system I have been
(slowly) working on.  It is very roughly based on the M.O.P.S. Atelier system
(http://perso.wanadoo.fr/mops/atelier2.htm), although that is in French and I
am not ;-) so I hope I have attributed it properly.

I have made some significant changes to it by using a trace macro to find the
low point for each of the road (bogey) wheels.  My system has idlers,
sprockets, returns, and road wheels; all 3 of them are here although only the
road wheels have special processing currently.  

I had some problems with the macro_s at the last minute, and based the average
position of the tank on road wheels 2 and 5, and you can see the problems this
causes in a few frames.  I had it averaging all the wheels and taking max wheel
travel into account, but had some vector issues so I had to drop it for the
competition (and almost missed).

The red suspension cylinders are actually some trace() macro debugging
statements, but I left them in as they don_t look too bad.  I plan on changing
my macro_s to allow several different types of suspension, but that_s for
later.  However, with very few roads on mars, most types of tank suspension
wouldn_t have the high amount of wheel travel necessary, so the cylinders
aren_t too bad, they just need more detail.
The landscape is a series of height fields at ever decreasing resolution that
blanket the area of 8S 284E on Mars, in the center of Valles Marineris.  I took
Mars MOLA data, exported it, and then enlarged it and eroded it with World
Machine.  For the space port and city bases, I had to use Leveller to more
precisely control the exact heights at areas to match the Moray objects. 
Getting scales to work properly with this was tough; in particular, the ground
under the tracks is a tad rougher than shows well due to vertical scaling
issues.

The _city_ that you can see briefly at the right hand side of the screen you
will hopefully see in much higher detail, but I had to cut most of it out for
the initial zoom in.  

This animation was intended to be a brief intro while the camera zoomed into the
city, but I _missed_ with the first animation, so you can see the camera stop,
then back up to zoom into the RTDR (Rough Terrain Drilling Rig).  I shot a
middle scene so I could preserve the initial zoom in.

I used both Viking images for the color of the ground as well as some custom
textures.  The bump maps didn_t turn out to be as large as I hopped, but the
first scene had already shot and missed by the time I saw it, so I hope to
improve the _roughness_ of the ground in future images.  

The individual frames were shot at 512x384 with the intention of motion blurring
with Virtual Dub (virtualdub.org) but with the major city shot showing the
narrator leaving the city pulled at the last minute, I just left it at
512x384.

If you have audio turned on, the voices come from AT&T _True Voice_ technology,
from a speech demo page.  Any pronunciation errors are thus not mine ;-)  I
changed spelling of a few of the words to coerce it into being hopefully
correct.

The Poser models are Mike 3 and Victoria 3 with a few morphs, although I forgot
the _vocal tract_ morphs so I didn_t try and sync the sound track with them.  
The space suits are from poserstyle.com.
The city uses the _Domes_ plugin for Moray.

I did all of the modeling on the terrain, RTDR, the space port, and the city,
including the wheels, as well as the trace() program to make the tracks follow
the terrain (with the belts _winding_ around the wheels from the M.O.P.S. macro
at the above mentioned site).

