EMAIL: ma.al@anthrosphinx.de
NAME: Markus Altendorff
TOPIC: Transformation
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Running out of time
COUNTRY: Germany
WEBPAGE: http://www.anthrosphinx.de/
RENDERER USED: Cinema 4D XL v6.3
TOOLS USED: Cinema, Cinema Net, Photoshop for texture and stills preparation, digital camera (Kodak DC290), Adobe Premiere for the video editing, GraphicConverter for building the movies from the rendered stills, M.Pack for converting the MOV file to MPEG.
CREATION TIME: less than 24 hours during 2 days altogether, re-using already built models.
HARDWARE USED: Apple Macintosh: G4 Dual (editing) plus my little render farm: G4 single and G3, all others collapsed with "not enough memory" errors...
VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS:
Should work fine on any screen (tried it on TFT), i've added a test picture at the beginning of the video which you may use to set up the brightness/contrast of your screen by stopping playback during that time. The movie itself is rather dark (intentionally), but i reduced some contrast and added 0.8 gamma to make it easier for the MPEG compressor. May look a little washed-out depending on your brightness setting. I've added a few background music suggestions ;-) since the video itself is without a sound track. :-(

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:
In short:
Night. A run-down city area. Someone seeking for a hideout - for a reason...
And now:
#include epic.background.story.h
;-)
She's been around for quite some time now, like, millenia? She hasn't aged much, though. Most of the time she'd sleep in suspended animation, cryostasis, only thawed by the ship's unrelenting interval timer to check for this planet's development. Watching the decline over the last few decades wasn't pleasant. And now this... it was supposed to be a simple walk in the dark, acquiring some sensor data, when the mirage device that maintained her human look suddenly went off like an early morning wakeup call after a long night of consuming too much of what was considered an accepted drug for the masses here. Some hideout for the moment when the shield would finally falter, transforming her from a below-average looking human to something a little less ... average, sure would come in handy... thankfully, the streets were empty at this time before sunrise, only some cars passing by, nothing to worry too much about. She turned the corner, crouched down and shielded her eyes from the glaring light that accompanied any failure or shutdown of the mirage field as the high-pitched electronic warning whining went from hectic to frantic ...

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:
First, the usual note: The result has nothing in common with what i intended. The video may not even be too much on-topic, but you may imagine me on my knees pleading for mercy ;-)
Oh, by the way, i remember a comment about my models being "borderline cliche" in the October 2000-January 2001 round - thanks, i'm trying hard! Most people will readily buy into cliche anytime, so i try to cater to this audience - maybe the few times where i airbrushed cars had some bad influence on me :-)
Why i ended up with starting to work on my entry on the evening of Friday, July 13th, two days to the deadline on Sunday, July 15th, is neither a funny story nor something with a happy ending, but i won't go into that.
I really don't know where the inspiration for the "shadow on the wall" look came from, but it solved most of the problems i had: Little time for modeling a human character, little time for fine-tuning the animation, little time for setting up some facial expressions, little time for rendering complex scenes, little time for post-production. Plus, it added some mystery to the whole animation (IMHO), for what better way to trigger the imagination by not showing a pre-defined image?
With only "2 days, 8 hours" (like the webpage said) remaining, it had to be something that could be done quick. I started out with shaping the two house corners, the pavement, the street and the brick wall with simple cubes. The street lamps are also poorly modelled, just a few "oil tanks" as the primitive is called in Cinema. I relied heavy on textures to improve the looks, and on darkness to hide the modelling...
The textures are unretouched photos from a digital camera: Pavement, concrete walls, brick walls. You can find them (all of them) in the ZIP file included. No models there, because a) they're in Cinema format, b) they're poor (cubes, remember?) and c) i won't yet give away the one model that i consider "less poor" ;-)
The two character models are recyclers of some sort: The "shadow-casting-only" human female is a standard model that comes with Cinema, the Zygote(tm) Woman, the other is my Anthrosphinx creature model (rev. 83, comes now with animated eyelids, a major improvement over rev. 81 (no eyelids) and rev. 82 (texture errors due to renderer upgrade) ;-)
The garbage cans are from an early (1997?) modelling for a never-finished animation.
The setup allowed for grubbiness far below what little i consider my "standard". Since only part of the characters is visible, i didn't stop to make sure that there's no slip when animating the feet - in fact, i'm not sure if the feet really touch the ground for most of the animation. IK for the legs is "like, totally screwed up and such", and i won't go into details like "whatever happens around frame 750 where the actual transformation is supposed to happen?"...
The text overlay was added in Adobe Premiere (easier than using the Foreground texture in cinema which would also have been a possibility). Gamma correction was done in Premiere, too. MPEG compression by Astarte M.Pack (no longer in stores after Apple bought the company).
That's pretty much all there is to say about modelling and such. My primary objective was to get *something* out for this round, for i found the topic *awesome*. That i'd end up with a rush job was something i never thought of. Anyway: have fun while you've got the time ;-)