EMAIL: reuven53@aol.com
NAME: Reuven Weiser
TOPIC: Gadgets & Odd Devices
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Juggling Machine
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: http://www.yucs.org/~rweiser/ray/

RENDERER USED: 
	POV-Ray 3.02 (though it would have been much easier with
	3.1 had I known about macros)

TOOLS USED: 
	CMPEG - for MPEG conversion

CREATION TIME:
	A few weeks of work and about 30 hours of rendering

HARDWARE USED:
	Pentium MMX 166, 24 MB RAM 

VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS:
	You may need to adjust the brightness setting on your monitor
	to ensure that the colors are neither too bright nor too dark.

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:
	This amazing Juggling Machine breaks the record for most
	objects juggled at once (formerly 11, if I'm not mistaken) by
	juggling 13 balls. No, it's not a perpetual motion machine; 
	the paddles are moving very quickly (as they'd have to in order
	to accomplish this feat) and you need a sharp eye (or a pause 
	button) to spot them.

	As the animation progresses, the camera's location and angle 
	shift from tracing the path of a single ball to a stabilized, 
	centered perspective.

	This is my first entry to the IRTC. I'm somewhat new to 
	animation, so I'm looking forward to any constructive criticism
	you can give me. Also, the code is a bit messy. I hope that any
	of you who are interested don't have too much trouble 
	deciphering it. 

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:
	First, I set up the motion of the balls (which I was actually 
	working on already for a Juggling Man, who can now be seen on 
	my web site). They do obey the laws of physics 
	(y = y0 + v0*t + .5*a*t^2). I then set up the paddles "around" 
	them. (I had to vary the motion of the paddles in order to 
	make sure that they didn't pass through the balls.) I then 
	built the machine, which was designed to "shadow" the pattern 
	traced by the balls. I then arranged the background setting.	

	No modeling tools were used in the creation of this animation. 
	All parts are pretty simple. Obviously, the balls are spheres. 
	The paddles are a union of cylinders. The tubes are differenced
	tori. The machine is a combination of meshes (for the sides 
	and front) and cylinders and sphere (for the edges). The logo 
	in the middle, my initials, is a union of simple text objects. 
	The curtain is just a box with a ripples normal, and the stone 
	platform and wooden floor are also just boxes. The spotlight 
	was a nice way of making any further background settings 
	irrelevant, besides the fact that one would expect no less for 
	such a momentous performance.
	
	I wrote every bit of code myself, except for the textures of 
	the gold, silver, stone table and wooden floor. I got those from 
	the standard POV-Ray library. No post-processing tools were used.