EMAIL: amdebe1@ulster.net
NAME: William de Beaumont
TOPIC: The End of...
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: The End of Good and Evil
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5
TOOLS USED: vim, nedit, pencil, paper
CREATION TIME: started on 2003.12.31, worked up to the deadline, 2004.01.15
HARDWARE USED: my Celeron 300A, my roommate's Pentium 4 2GHz
VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: slow it down to 12fps, I didn't have time to render enough frames to get a higher framerate
ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:
This is my first attempt at a really abstract raytraced animation. Most of the 
animation is in black and white, representing good and evil. A sphere on a
checkered plane (had to do it ;-) gains contrast and becomes two half-circles,
one black, one white. The camera turns and this is revealed to be the top of a
wine glass filled with black and white substances. The camera spins around the
glass, and the substances swirl, turning it into a yin-yang. The dots continue
in from the edges, and morph into airplanes, while the background turns
mountainous. Finally, the planes collide, producing a colorful fireball, the
only color in the whole animation. It is neither good, nor evil, and it
represents the end of both.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:
The animation consists of 4 scenes, in separate files:
checkerball:
This is just the sphere-on-checkered-plane, simple stuff. I kinda had to fake
the contrast-enhancement with a pigment gradient on the sphere, instead of doing
it with lighting, because that didn't work so well.
goblet:
This is the yinyang forming in the wineglass. I think I spent the most time on
this part. The larger swirling is accomplished with a function based pigment.
The smaller swirls that eventually form the dots are actually cones sticking out
just a little bit, with a similar pigment. The wineglass is just a cut off blob
with a torus lip at the cutoff. The scene is surrounded by a mirrored inverse
box, with a little bit of hard-water stain pigmentation, so you can tell it's a
mirror.
planes:
This is where the yinyang dots turn into planes, and the background turns into
mountains by the sea. The planes are blobs, and the dots are just spheres
intersecting them. The background is a (very time-consuming) isosurface. I tried
to make the "mountains" look higher than the "sea", but it didn't turn out so
visible.
explosion:
This is where the planes collide, crumple, and explode. The explosion is
something I'm particularly proud of, and made easy with isosurfaces. The
explosion is actually transparent with an IOR, and that produces some very
explosion-like (if unexpected) effects. The planes crumpling isn't as visible as
I wanted it to be, but then again it doesn't look as good as I wanted it to, so
it balances out ;-).
I had an idea for an additional scene zooming back out to the
sphere-on-checkered-plane, and turning that into a crystal ball, but alas, I ran
out of time.

Most of the scenes use splines for the camera movement, which is a vast
improvement over weird mathematical formulas for camera location that I had used
in povray 3.1, both in quality and ease of use.