EMAIL: evilsnack@hotmail.com
NAME: John VanSickle
TOPIC: Explosion
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: The Importance of Laser Safety
WEBPAGE:  http://users4.50megs.com/enphilistor/irtc.htm
COUNTRY:  US of A
RENDERER USED:  POV-Ray 3.6 for Windows.
TOOLS USED:  Text editor, CMPEG, pencils, paper
HARDWARE USED:  Compaq Presario 2170US laptop (Celeron 2GHz, 192Meg RAM)
CREATION TIME:  About six weeks.  Final rendering was complete on 14 July 2005.
VIEWING RECOMMENDATION:  Full color, 24 frames per second.
ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:  Always ensure that the line of fire is clear.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:

I typed out a bunch of scene code, rendered the frames, and slapped them
together with an MPEG compiler, just like I always do.

For those of you who aren't gun enthuiasts, Rusty and Kammi are engaged in a
pastime called trap shooting.  A round of trap consists of 25 attempts to shoot
the clay pigeon (a Frisbee-shaped target) that is sent flying from the trap-
house.  When each shooter is ready to fire, he/she yells "Pull!" and the
pigeon is shot out in a random direction away from the shooter.  The shooter
gets one shot at the pigeon.  After each shooter has fired, they all move to
the next position on the trap field; there are 25 positions from which to fire.
The gun used is a shotgun, usually .20 gauge with bird shot.  The clay pigeon
is very brittle, so if even one BB from the shot hits it, it will break apart.

I myself have only shot trap once, and I got six out of 25, which is what
most beginners do the first time out.

To make things easier to see, I made the clay pigeon here much larger than real-
life clay pigeons.  The two shots which show them coming out of the trap house
used x10 frame supersampling to create the motion blur.

The smoke that comes out of the flying saucer is a series of transparent spheres
with scattering media inside.  This led to insanely high render times (over six
hours for some of the frames), which is why that shot is as short as it is.  I
also should have done more to make the saucer look like it was in motion at
the time.

I also noticed, when it was too late to do any new rendering, that some of the cuts are
too abrupt.

There is a lot more MPEG artifacting than I like to have, but all of my attempts
to increase the quality level caused my MPEG encoder to quit with errors.

New models for this round:
* The clubhouse and the trap field

This entry almost didn't happen due to my ongoing Diablo II addiction.  The final
three shots (the explosion in the sky, Rusty saying "?", and the final message),
were modeled and rendered the day before the deadline.

If you have any other questions about things, e-mail me directly, or leave
comments on the comments page.