EMAIL: jh@cfjh.de
NAME: Jürgen Hochwald
TOPIC: The End Of
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: The End Of
COUNTRY: Germany
WEBPAGE: www.cfjh.de
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.5 for Linux
TOOLS USED: Kate (all source code editing)
            xv (viewing the single images)
            mpeg_encode (for mpeg creation)
            mpeg_play (viewing) 
CREATION TIME: 2 Month (rendering 3 weeks)
HARDWARE USED: Athlon 650 MHz
VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: tested with mpeg_play and xmms
                         view with 25 fps
ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:

During the exploration of an unkown planet the shuttle touches down after a
crash of the navigation computer. 

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:

All objects are generated with pure povray code and macros. I've reused some
objects from my first anim (fly_esc).
Both the mothership and the shuttles have 'interior', and here are some scenes made.

The images on the monitors are not image maps. All stuff is generated by 
Pov-objects and then scaled to be nearly flat.

The humans are created from matices, one for each component x,y,z and normals.
The I've some macros to transform theese matrices. Body, head, arms and legs
are created with their own matrices, then all objects are tranformed and finally
connected to get a solid body. The last step is to calculate the surface normals
and write smooth triangle objects to make the human visible.
Currently all humans are using the same matices, only the textures are different.
The hair is also done by a matrix-based macro. The matrix gives the shape, the
macro calculates the normals and makes the (single) hair vertically to the local
normal. A random function placed lots of single hairs over the full matrix.

The animations are done by an enhanced keyframe macro. The macro uses a time
index, the value for the variable and a function. These parameters are
stored in an array, the macro uses now the function to connect two points.
Possible connect-funstions are 'linear', 'sin', 'sin neg', 'doudble S' and
0.5'linear'+0.5'double S'. Also a spline interpolation (parametric, cubic) is
possible.

All animations are done with Povray's internal animation system. I used the
clock value in seconds (clock=0 means 0 sec, clock=3 means 3 seconds). Most
animations steps are done on hole seconds. Rendered with 25 fps, the shots
are changing von x*25 frames.

Now I've more than 12000 lines of source code to make the anim, with 5500
lines the humans are the biggest part.

All the making was very time critical. The pure rendering needed more than
20 days at 24 hrd/day to render. The latest shot was finished only 10 hrs
before the deadline. There are some minor bugs in the anim, but I had no time
to rerender the shots.

There is also a long todo list. All humans are done from the same matrices,
for future versions different shapes were good. Also the humans need some
more modelling. I find the dialog scenes someway ugly, but currently I don't
know how to change. While creating the humans with Pov macros, the parsing time
is heavy increasing, often I've frames where the parsing is much longer than
the rendering  (ex. 7 minutes parse, 3 minutes render).