EMAIL: jhem_m@hotmail.com
NAME: Jhem Murray
TOPIC: Unnecessarily Complicated Devices
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: A Clockwork Kettle
COUNTRY: United Kingdom/ Scotland
WEBPAGE: www.jhem.co.uk (currently down)
RENDERER USED: 3DS Default Scanline Renderer
TOOLS USED: 3DS MAX, Adobe Premiere, LSX-MPEG Encoder
CREATION TIME: 212 hrs
HARDWARE USED: AMD Athlon 1.2 GHz with 384 MB RAM

VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS:

Animation can be viewed with the standard Windows Media Player, note that the resolution is
400x300

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:

The animation starts off in the character's bedroom, early in the morning. The alarm clock 
starts ringing at 9 am, the vibration of the clock soon causes it to release the beam it was 
carefully balanced on, and this triggers off a series of other reactions!

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:

The animation involved a lot of tricky physical dynamics that had to be dealt with first. The ringing alarm clock was a model i built myself in 3D Studio MAX, when the alarm clock releases the beam you'll notice that it pulls down another beam because they are attached by a piece of string. The string was hand animated, i simply used the line tool and then animated the individual vertexes. I had to play about a while before the string looked satisfactory. Next, we see the glass ball/marble bouncing down a slide. This was also hand animated, I didn't use any dynamics systems or scripts. The tricky part was the dominos, this took a while to sort out. Basically, the animation for one domino is cloned multiple times which gives the effect on screen. The first few dominos were animated differently, because i needed to give an impression of inertia before they start to topple. Particle animation was used for flame on the lighter car object, this was just a matter of using MAX's super spray particle system. Next, a small anvil is released when the string snaps, again, the string was animated by hand using the line tool and then animating the individual vertexes. A match attached to the see-saw is lit and then it moves onto light the rocket. The rocket shoots upwards, a particle system was used to create the burning tail of the rocket. You'll notice the rocket squashes sightly before it spins out of control, i simply used the bend modifier here to create the collision effect. The action man toy then slides down the wire and bumps into a pillar with a ball on top. The ball moves very slowly to give an impression of weight. The ball then falls on a second see-saw which flicks the switch on the kettle. The animation uses some clever camera tricks such as motion blur, although this takes around 4 times as long to render! Most objects in the animation which move fast have an object motion blur applied to them. The light you can see coming through the window at the start is volumetric lighting, and ray-traced omni lights (a total of 5) are used to light the room. Most of the textures have a bump and specular map applied to them. The animation was rendered in 5 sections, which were later put together in premiere. LSX-MPEG encoder was used to convert from avi>mpg.