EMAIL:		jull43@tampabay.rr.com
NAME:		Matt Giwer
TOPIC:		Duel
COPYRIGHT:	I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE:		Shinkaga
COUNTRY:	USA
WEBPAGE:	http://www.giwersworld.org/artv/ & artii/ & artiii/ & artiv/
RENDERER USED:	povray 3.6
TOOLS USED:	gimp, mpeg_encode
RENDER TIME:	47.875 hr estimate based on 3447 frames about 50 seconds
		each
HARDWARE USED:	Celeron 400, 64M, linux 2.4.18-3 kernel

VIEWING: The usual highly recommended computer. FWIW, I did once post
viewing advice here and was downgraded by those who did not follow it so
this is a worthless section.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

	Shinkaga. Usually spelled Shinkage in American English and seen in
Shinkage-Ryu, use Google. The student here is clearly violating the
discipline out of passion. A cliched blood fued.

	A duel over a woman. The bad guy holding her prisoner and the good
guy coming to the rescue. Liberal theft from Kurasawa and Bruce Lee. Also
stolem from the sequel to The Seven Samurai -- there really is one. 

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

From Life of Brian

   Jerusalem Person: You just can't please some people. 

   Brian the ex-cripple: That's just what Jesus said. 

	So I read high praise in the last round for the visual resolution
quality of the animation. So this time I go for both length of the
presentation and resolution. 

	Doing both requires setting a theme and exposition that does not
require much bandwidth to show a lot of frames with the mpeg1 codec. Minimum
motion as a fraction of total pixels and simple scenes are needed to keep
down the bandwidth. Looking at the size of the finished mpeg I could have
gone back and included more motion and more complicated scenery but the
calendar rules.

	8-Ball got a woman but still no balls so to speak. A bit like Bugs
Bunny in a dress. After I see how Team America plays out I'll think about an
8-Ball sex scene.

	The enduring Kurasawa scenes are those with minimal motion when
action is expected. I only steal from the best. 

New Tricks: 

	The tower took forever to render with actual texture mapped
superellipsoids. So I created an image map of a flat "brickwork" of them and
mapped it to a cylinder. 

	When the movement is too hard, change the point of view just like
George Lucas does. When robot stalks back and forth there was a choice of
lots of work on the legs on the turn for maybe five to ten frames or a close
up with the legs out of frame when he turns. 

Rule 38: 

	If you are ever conceivably interested in animation, create every
object with animation in mind. In my last one Dance I used the bot I created
in my first robot animation years ago.

GENERAL INFO:	

http://www.giwersworld.org/artiv/mpeg.phtml has generic comments on size
limited animations. Pixelation and file size are tradeoffs. Higher quality
means larger file. I trade off size and time.

http://www.giwersworld.org/artv/ has several examples of animations as
submitted and in optimum resolution. Generally it is 10M submitted and 25M
optimum resolution.