EMAIL: nazrat@athabascau.ca
NAME:  Nazrat Durand
TOPIC: Toys
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE:   Castle Protects House
COUNTRY: Canada
WEBPAGE: 
RENDERER USED: POV-RAY 3.02

TOOLS USED:  cmpeg 1.0, LEGO, MicroMegablocks, TANDEM blocks, 
             TYCO blocks.
A modified version of the the building brick library that
Filip Spacek <http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Park/6522/> modified for POV-RAY from Paul Gyugyi <http://www.gyugyi.com> 
Rayshade library.

I have included the files used with cmpeg so that others can see
what I have done.  My first attempt in a previous round suffered
for not knowing how to manipulate cmpeg.  I still need to do a
lot of experimentation, but now I at least know which numbers can
have a major impact.

CREATION TIME:  The little house took a quarter hour to physically
  build and over two hours to program.  It has 146 bricks in it.
  The castle, with a few more bricks, took a bit more time.

  The castle was created for the previous competition.  I felt that
  the previous animation did not do justice to this object.  Therefore
  I am trying again.  With over five times the number of frames.

  Total pieces in castle =
  19 + 2*928 + 6*1137 + 5*472=  11057

  Unique placements = 19 + 928 + 1138 + 472 = 2536

  It took me about six hours to count them today.  
  I hesitate to guess how much time was spent placing them.

HARDWARE USED: A 66 MHz 486 20MB was used to design the castle.
  Rendering was done on a 266 MHz Pentium II machine with 128 MB.

VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS:  I used VMPEG on a wintel machine.

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:

 A lovely little house is destroyed by a younger sibling's errant
 ball.  Therefore the elder sibling builds a castle to protect the
 new house from bouncing balls.

 Oh, I added the last few frames so that this thing will loop 
 relatively seamlessly.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:

Each brick is positioned by translating by units of widr and
talr.  By adding and then commenting out various loops and clock
variables, I was able to selectively build or display different
parts of the castle.

One goody I would like to share with people, though.  There
is no combination of rotations and translations that will 
transform a left-hand object into a right-hand object.  For
those interested, here is a bit of code that will do so:

  #declare YZ_Mirror = transform {
     matrix < -1, 0, 0,
               0, 1, 0,
               0, 0, 1,
               0, 0, 0 >
     } 

  #declare Right_Hand_Object = object { Left_Hand_Object                              
                                 transform YZ_Mirror
                                 }

BTW:  #include <standard transform warning>;
      If your object is far from the YZ plane, you may 
      have to go hunting for its mirror twin.

It is amazing how much time can be saved on building the
right gate tower when the above transform is applied to
the left gate tower!  
(Left tower = 2 weeks ) 
(right tower = a couple-three days of agonizing, 
               an hour of Reading The Friendly Manual,
               a moment of inspiration,
               an hour of trial and error )