TITLE: chess
NAME: Bernard Hatt
COUNTRY: UK
EMAIL: bmh@arkady.demon.co.uk
TOPIC: Imposter!
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: chess.mpg
ZIPFILE: chess.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    povray 3.6.1

TOOLS USED: 
    MicroEmacs 3.11, gnuchess, ffmpeg, mpeg2enc, Linux (Slackware)

CREATION TIME: 
    Final render ~12h

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon 11000

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 


A chess battle.


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


I saved a simple/short chess game (gnuchess vs a version of gnuchess
altered to only think 1 move ahead), and wrote a simple conversion
program to make a Povray include file (game.inc) which has an array for
each move and a list of the piece(s) moved/captured.

The moves were then grouped into a number of scene files (title +
sc001.pov -> sc019.pov) containing 1 or moves, the camera, look_at
position and aperture were stored in separate file (camera.inc), most of
the camera positioning between 'cuts' utilised splines.

My early attempts had problems with MPEG encoding artifacts when using
VCDish bandwidths, my solution was to use focal blur to cut down the
detail where it was not required.

The sky was created using an agate pattern with colour values sampled
from some photos of the sky, the surrounding hills are simple height
maps (not detailed, but are never in sharp focus).

The pieces themselves are mostly SOR's with some CSG for the
knight and king/queen.

Most of the mpeg encoding was done with mpeg2enc, but the final pass for
the IRTC entry was done with ffmpeg (2 pass) "vcd_final.sh"

I created a very basic sound track (64kbit mono) consisting of a few
basic sounds as it seems to enhance the video.

If I had more time, I would work on the arm movements for the
sword/mace, the physics of king falling and maybe improve the sound.


