EMAIL: klynn@uswest.net
NAME: Kevin Lynn
TOPIC: Gadgets and Odd Devices
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.

TITLE: The Beard Blaster 935000
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: 
RENDERER USED: Ray Dream Studio 5
TOOLS USED: Mainactor, to construct the mpeg1 
CREATION TIME: about 1.3 hours
HARDWARE USED: Dual Celeron 333, Windoze NT
VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS:
 The animation is intended to have an audio track, so in case your player can't
 do audio, here's the text.
 Please imagine the text below as the "voice over" for the TV commercial.

   "Introducing the new Beard Blaster 935000; the last razor you'd ever need!"

   "The first blades shave right down to the skin, but it doesn't end there.
    The patented sub-dermal blade digs down the very root of the whisker!  The
    newly cut material then passes through the mulching unit; and finally, the
    hot lamination unit produces unnaturally smooth skin!"
  
   "The Beard Master 935000: the future of faces!"

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:
 This is a spoof of some TV advertisements we have in the US, promoting multiblade 
 shaving razors.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:
 I used this project to evaluate Ray Dream Studio 5.02.  If you're wondering, I
 decided that the feature list is quite good for consumer-priced 3D software (it can even
 take in Poser 3 files, giving the user a biped motion feature), but I found that I had
 to fight the interface to do what I wanted.  Maybe I'm too set in my ways when it comes 
 to 3D software, but I found the GUI to be very annoying.  It was definitely nice to use
 a renderer that can take advantage of the multiprocessor computer, though.  

 The animation is made up of 2 shots: the shot of the rotating razor, then the shot of
 the shaving demonstration.  These were modeled and animated with RDS5.  The renderer was
 set to raytrace mode, and produced 2 windoze AVI files.  These (along with the ill-fated
 audio track) were loaded into Main Concept's Mainactor Sequencer where they were strung 
 together, with a cute little 3D wipe effect added for the first transition between shot 1
 and shot 2.  Shot 1 is then repeated at the end of the animation, to close out the 
 commercial.