EMAIL: gregj56590@aol.com
NAME: Greg M. Johnson
TOPIC: Animations
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: The Lane-changing Incident at the Pan-Compositional Games
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: http://members.xoom.com/gregjohn
RENDERER USED: povray 3.02
TOOLS USED: cmpeg, hf-lab90, CorelPhotoPaint 7
CREATION TIME: 5-6 days of rendering
HARDWARE USED: Pentium 200 MHz in Aptiva C9E
ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: People are still talking about it. The argument over the Metal Men's maneuver in the final heat against the Yellow_Pines set the tone for the remainder of the 3001 Pan-Compositional Games.  Was it legal?  You can decide for yourself in this slow-motion footage.
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: I created an INC with a human character whose legs and arms move as a function of the clock. The characters are blobs. I called the INC several times with different clock variables in order to create the Yellow_Pine runners.  I then put two different characters into the same blob statement. This makes up the Metal Men runners. 
The mountain was created with Pov-ray and hflab.  I started out with a zoom-in on a dark region of the 'bumps' pattern in Pov-ray. Choosing a dark region enabled me to ensure that the character is at a sort of plateau surrounded by mountains.  I imported this image into hflab and set tweaked it until it looked like I wanted (don't remember all the details). 
The camera moves by virtue of  translation and rotation as a function of the clock with a constant look_at vector. 
I apologize for the distracting effect at the end.  In earlier drafts, the "Finish" sign was a mere text object hanging in the air. It made many cool reflections on the runner's body that looked like so many moving tatoos.  A last minute tweak with ambient and transparency of the sign's texture sort of ruined the effect. Now, there's distracting, pulsating reflections as the man runs underneath the sign. I didn't have time to re-render the project.  Some may find other aspects of the animation disorienting, but most of these are intentional.