EMAIL: steve@kanku.freeserve.co.uk
NAME: Steve Townrow
TOPIC: Robot
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Gladiators
COUNTRY: England
WEBPAGE: www.kanku.freeserve.co.uk
RENDERER USED: Cinema 4D XL v5.3
TOOLS USED: Cinema 4D XL v5.3, Photoshop 4, CMPEG

CREATION TIME: Difficult to quantify. Many evenings and most weekends for
3 months. Hundreds of hours. Final render time: 104 hours.

HARDWARE USED: Pentium II, 333 Mhz, 8 Mb Open GL graphics, 192 Mb ram.

VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: ActiveMovie for Windows 95/NT works well. It looks
OK on my PC but it can appear dark on some. Please adjust your monitor's
gamma until it looks like it is set in midday sun.


ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:

Gladiatorial combat between two robots in the style of ancient Rome. One is
rusty, nervous and reluctant; the other is shiny, bold and cocky...

The animation was inspired by the films Spartacus and Ben Hur and incorporates
elements from both - gladiators on wheels!


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:

This is my first full animation and is modelled and rendered entirely in
Cinema 4D XL (C4D). However, I believe I have used none of the features
unique to the XL version - so this could have been done with the more
basic Cinema 4D GO version. The only other programs used were Photoshop for
texture creation and the frames were assembled using CMPEG. No post processing
of the frames was performed other than in Photoshop to achieve the fade-out
and fade-in near the end.

As there are quite a few scenes, I found it was necessary to script the action
with a storyboard. My biggest concern was getting the story across in under
5Mb. This proved to be difficult without compromising the story, so rather
than drop some scenes, I decided to render it slightly smaller.

The helm of the shiny robot is based on an original Thracian helm. The
scythe-blades on his wheel where inspired by those on a chariot in Ben Hur.
The most intricate parts of the models are the hands - particularly the
thumbs.

I wanted a sharp contrast between the two robots and this is achieved by
their helms and textures. The helm of the rusty robot is based on helms
used by the Samnites. The rust texture is based on one by Bryan
Leister/Dirk Beichert from Deepshade (the free C4D texture site) but I
have reworked it extensively for this animation.

The arena is mainly modelled out of one stone block duplicated many times since
C4D does not yet have instancing where you can create a logical copy.
This had a huge overhead in the file size (hence no ZIP archive) which meant
that the renderer would take few minutes to get going for every frame. The
stone texture was created using C4Ds built-in 3D Earth Texture which took a lot
of tweaking to get just right.

The drapes were modelled by hand from a sub-divided plane by manually
pulling the points about. The other periphery such as the banners, poles and
gates where built from simple geometry.

I wanted to use a more widescreen aspect ratio (1.73:1) and so I opted to
render it at 304x176. Most MPEG players seem to cope well where the dimensions
are multiples of 16 pixels so it shouldn't be a problem.


On a personal note, I have enjoyed this immensely and will certainly use the
characters again. Much of the animation deals with introducing the characters,
their personalities and having them react to each other. I have many ideas for
subsequent animations with more visual jokes and interaction between them.


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

Original rust texture by Bryan Leister/Dirk Beichert - available at Deepshade.

Thanks to Geoff Austin who helped with the storyboard and gave me valuable
advice and feedback.


Steve Townrow
Web:   www.kanku.freeserve.co.uk
Email: steve@kanku.freeserve.co.uk
Email: stephen@sysdeco.co.uk