EMAIL: dresserd@techie.com
NAME: Daniel Dresser
TOPIC: Unnecessarily Complicated Devices
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Brass and Steel
COUNTRY: Canada
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1
TOOLS USED: 
   pencil and paper for rough work
   K'nex for building model of blades interlocking
   Bumper for viewing test renders
   IrfanView for image conversion
   cmpeg for mpeg encoding

CREATION TIME:
     Design took most of my time not wasted on English essays for the last couple of months.
     Render time was about 50 hrs. 
     (not counting all the segment I messed up and had to redo)

HARDWARE USED: Athlon 1200

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:

Many of the devices we use in our everyday life are overly complex, it's just that we don't 
notice.  The challenge for this contest is to make a device which shows it's complexity.
I started with the idea of massive whirling interlocking blades, and then started thinking
about what I could use them for.  I quite like the purpose I found.  I had some fun with the 
gearing, but in the end, I think it could actually work if all the materials were 20 times as
strong as reality.  (Any machinists out there who want to try it?)

The inspiration for this device comes partially from the D'ni civilization created by Cyan
(Myst/Riven computer games).  This is not traditional D'ni machinery, but although it lacks
ornamentation, it shows the D'ni values of elegantly exposed workings, and perfect 
craftsmanship.

The ideal setting for this rendering would be a massive stone cathedral, but I don't have time
to design one.
     
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:

Straight POV-Ray code.  Lots of math.

A lot of the math actually isn't quite right, but I doubt if it is noticeable in the final mpeg.
I apologize for how sloppy my source files are.

Almost everything is just CSG of boxes, cylinders, spheres and prisms, with the odd lathe
or blob for a fire.  I relied extensively on while loops.

All the movements are defined by equations - I actually found a use for all the trig they teach
at school.

What gave me the most grief was getting it encoded into mpeg.  I'm still not ecstatic about
final result, but at the beginning I was using avi2mpg, I just couldn't get it to output an
acceptable quality in a reasonable amount of space.  Even without the knowledge of
the advanced features, cmpeg gave me about 2000% better quality.  This was where the
image converter came in - I had already rendered for 30 hours into bitmap, so I had to 
convert the whole thing to targa.