EMAIL: ma.al@anthrosphinx.de
NAME: Markus Altendorff
TOPIC: Alien Invasion
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Alien Invasion - a How (Not) To
COUNTRY: Germany
WEBPAGE: http://www.anthrosphinx.de/
RENDERER USED: Cinema 4D Net 6.1
TOOLS USED: Cinema 4D XL 6.1, Adobe Premiere, GraphicConverter, Astarte M.Pack
CREATION TIME: 6 Weeks
HARDWARE USED: Apple G4 450 MP, 640 MB RAM, for editing, plus a G4 450 with 384 MB RAM.
VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: Works with standard Windows MPEG and MacOS Quicktime 3 to 5. You may want to change brightness/contrast on your monitor. There is detail in the darker parts of the file.
ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:

A shiny, glistening spaceship apporaches a desert mountain and touches down. The door opens. Immersed in light, a figure leaves the ship. The doors close ... and, well, see for yourself ;-) 

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:

I started with the Anthrosphinx creature, a 100 % hand-made (every single polygon built by hand, no clipart or other pre-made meshes involved) model, based on an airbrush design i created some years ago. This took about 2 to 3 Weeks alone. The ship was finished in less than a week (spending between 0 and 5 hours per day after work at this). Both models relied heavily on the new HyperNURBS (Surface subdivsion) modelling in Cinema 4D XL, without which i wouldn't have been able to accomplish the results. I admit there's a lot of room for improvement, especially with the textures, but some serious non-computer related issues kept me from staying within the timeframe i planned.
So animating took only four days, a week before the deadline. There wasn't much fine-tuning involved, mostly try-and-error (render it, look what went wrong, fix it up, render the portion again, and so on).
What's missing is some sort of "breaking to its knees" of the creature towards the end of the movie, but i didn't get to setting the inverse kinematics right. A thinking error when defining the bones lead to being able only to a) turn the head or b) lower the chin... i decided to stick with a).
As this first render run was for MPEG only, i chose a 2x2 colour and edges oversampling at the 320x240 resolution, yet some of the frames took more than 20 minutes to render. Strange enough, the next frame would only require 2 or 3 minutes, something i could finally trace back to an energy saving setting.
Lighting was "a little" misplaced, it required rather heavy gamma correction when converting the frames to the movie. Most of the fancy gimmicks i dreamt of were skipped due to the approaching deadline.
But at least i made it.
Non-rendering enhancement was limited to adding the text lines with premiere (a thing which could've been easily accomplished within Cinema 4D, too) and arranging the sequences (with a crossfade towards the first third of the animation, where the landing ship scene and the static ship scene meet). A gamma correction was made, by setting the Gamma to 1.4, raising the dark areas to 25 and limiting the bright areas to 240 units.