EMAIL: LOWERCASEONLYtimNOTnikias(At)gmx.netWARE
NAME: Tim Nikias Wenclawiak, aka "Tim Nikias v2.0"
TOPIC: Duel
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Highnoon
COUNTRY: Germany
WEBPAGE: http://www.nolights.de

RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.6.1 for Windows

TOOLS USED: TMpgEnc for Encoding the MPEG-1 file, PSP7 for the subtitle-images (which were added in POV-Ray, no post-processing used on entire short)

CREATION TIME: roughly 40 days

HARDWARE USED: 2.8GHz Athlon XP, 786 MB DDR-RAM

VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: Should work fine on any player, it's a standard MPEG1 after all. Fullscreen might be nice. :)

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:

A Jet and an UFO duel for the future of the earth: the winner keeps it!

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:

1. The idea and concept

To begin with, I did a brainstorming session on what could actually be duelling each other. As I didn't have any macros or scripts prepared for animations to time things, everything had to be scripted on the go. Thus I came to the most basic items to be animated: models that have near to no moving parts and won't require animation to move them about. Flying planes was the obvious choice.

2. Modelling phase

I created all models and scenes from scratch, though several of my older Macros were used to aid in that process, most of all my Mesh-Modelling-Macros and BSplines-Include-File. I sketched and designed both Jet and UFO on paper before attempting to model them using CSG and meshes. Keep in mind that everything (aside the encoding to MPEG) was done using ONLY POV-Ray for Windows' Editor, all meshes were constructed using older as well as new and specially scripted macros inside POV-Ray.
I didn't want to have a standard black background for some kind of galactic fight, and a simple ground-plane doesn't look too sophisticated. Thus I created a simple backdrop which doesn't take too long to render: The mountain-range in the distance is a heightfield, the clouds are just five textured and layered spheres that throw shadows on each other, faking a volumetric effect.
Both UFO and Jet were constructed with few variables to be set. The jet's propulsion and the amount of the missiles under the wings can be set, the UFO allows different types of conditions and texturing, additionally, as the meshes required for the UFO are quite large, I created a low-poly version for the preview renders.

3. Preproduction

During the modelling of the objects I've also begun preproduction, namely writing the macros required to animate the objects and test the effects. The explosion caused by the missiles, as well as those caused by the plasma-ball were rendered dozens of times during the hours in which I wasn't actually at the PC, as rendering these required quite some processing power. The explosion uses a technique common to 3D-games: the particles aren't true volumetric spheres, but rather textured and cleverly lit half-spheres. Only the orange/red-glow was made using POV-Ray's media. The plasma-explosion, however, is 100% media with somewhat around 25 large particles.
During preproduction I've also modified my Glare-Macros in order to use them to project subtitles onto the viewing screen, as well as made use of the Glare-Macros themselves to create the blinding highlight in the scene where the UFO goes into horizontal flight, so, no post-processing in this short! :-)
The title and my name in the first shot are actually layered behind the clouds as to receive shadows. The other subtitles were ambient-lit and stayed unaffected of the lighting.
I also needed to experiment on the heat-haze effect visible in the scene with the radar-dish. I intended to use the distortion effect on a few more occasions, but didn't find enough time to do the testing, so it remained a special effect for this single shot.

4. Animation

During the production of the short I've implemented various macros to ease the handling. Some simple timers allowed me to just set a beginning second and an end-second, and the macros would take care of returning a value between 0 and 1 as I find that the most intuitive. I've also implemented a Shaky-Cam-Macro, which took care of all the subtle - and on occasions, obvious - camera movements. The macro wasn't done until the fourth or fifth scene, and it is obvious that I got more experienced with it towards the end. Still, the deadline didn't permit redoing the first scenes.
What I'd basically do for animation is brainstorm on the action taking place, sketch a small storyboard and, using my vivid imagination, visualize the scenes in succession. I'd also throw some of my DVDs into the drive and watch certain parts of movies to get ideas on where to position the camera and how to animate it.
Having no experience with animations so far (except for several tech-demos on my website, but you can hardly call that animation) I sometimes found it difficult to achieve the smooth motion I envisioned. In the scene where the Jet evades the plasma-ball I wanted it to do a barrel-roll, but the animation looked so jerky that I decided against it. I've given thought to implementing a script which would, rather than animating the jet directly using keyframes, use input values to physically animate the jet, with banking and all. Again, time didn't permit for that endeavor.
Difficulties arose when the movement of the objects exceeded the actual size of the desert-set, e.g. when the UFO tries to outrun the missile, it would pass the clouds, or on certain shots the objects were placed almost on the mountain-range. To avoid this issue I've soon come up with an animated texture which is placed on a disc at the center of the set. The objects were then just positioned above it, and the animation of the texture conveys the image of a moving jet or UFO.

5. Issues during rendering

The meshes for the UFO were 16MB in size, especially the battered hull at the end required a highly detailed model. Generating the meshes on the fly during rendering was no option as some of them required well over a minute for parsing alone. Would I have had to add 2 minutes parsing time per picture, the animation would never have been completed in time. Thus, the meshes were generated in a seperate file and then saved to disk. Still, loading such large meshes requires a few seconds.
Another problem arose when using too many particles. POV-Ray only allows to stack 100 objects into each other, the particle amount in some scenes easily exceeded that limit! I resorted to using less particles with less transparency, more turbulenced textures and larger in size.

6. Final Notes

Time-Constraints kept me from redoing the first shots to match the style and dynamics of the later scenes, and I would have added a few more distortion effects, namely as an add-on to the plasma-charging, if I had started earlier and thus, had more time. Sometimes I was a little too ambitious and then had to cut a scene into two parts, as doing it in one take increased the complexity for animation exponentially. I do think though that I managed to hide that pretty well by doing very dynamic shots which required a cut in any case (like the camera zooming in on the missile hitting the UFO).
In the end, I'm quite satisfied with what I was able to pull off, given the late start and no experience.

Hope all this text helps future contestants to render an entry of their own! :-)

Regards,
Tim Nikias v2.0