EMAIL: hartleym@pmail.sit.edu.my
NAME: Michael Hartley
TOPIC: Inner Workings
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: The Tortoise
COUNTRY: Malaysia
WEBPAGE: http://www.angelfire.com/mt/ofolives
RENDERER USED: Povray (3.0.2 ?)
TOOLS USED: CMPEG to (free DOS program) convert TGA's to an MPEG file.
	    Microsoft Paint to draw the image and normal maps for
	    	the spaceship
	    imagoWeb (free Windows program) to convert the resulting
		BMPs to PNG for use in PovRay.
   
CREATION TIME: 1 month to think of the idea, 2 months on and off to
	       design the scenes, a final render might take 12-15 hrs,
	       if I did one.
HARDWARE USED: 166 MHz Pentium MMX
VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: None.
ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:

What makes the world go round? Is it love? Money? Or something else...?

It was once believed that the earth rested on the back of a gigantic
tortoise. The march of modern scientific thought has caused this idea
to fall into ridicule and declining popularity. The space age has shown
that, in fact, there is no longer any such tortoise. The only possible
conclusion is that the tortoise which once supported the earth has
retreated in shame in the face of public mockery. 

In this animation, based on SCIENTIFIC FACTS* amongst other things**,
we discover what new niche, what pivotal role, the tortoise now
occupies.

Footnotes:

* Specifically, the following scientific facts:
    The earth is round,
    The earth has a moon,
    Tortoises have 4 legs.

** such as wild irrational speculation.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:

I created the frames using the standard animation support in Povray. 
I used about 7 different .pov files (but discarded the output of one
of them). I used some third party textures and include files,
specifically,

* A cylindrical map of the moon (downloaded from somewhere)
* A cylindrical map of the earth, converted from a spherical map of
the earth (Please don't ask why I bothered to do this) which I
downloaded years ago (before the age of the WWW). [ the conversion
was done using a program of my own, written eons ago and long since
lost ]
* xstars.inc, likewise downloaded from the internet. Much nicer
stars than my "The City" stills submission "asteroid".

Sorry, I can't remember the URLs for any of these downloads.

All other image_maps and compound objects etc are my own work. 

No path generators, or object modelers etc etc were used. Ouch.

Lessons I learnt:
* Next time I will plan the project more carefully, so I can give
more care to the scenes at the end, if I need to.
* Next time, the clock variable will represent real time.
* In science fiction movies, when the camera zooms past a planet...
it looks very nice, but it takes some work (either mathematical 
calculations or a lot of trial and error) to gt the camera close
enough to the planet without crashing into it

Tips:
* The function f(t) = 3 t^2 - 2 t^3 has the following useful properties:
f(0) = 0, f(1) = 1, and the derivatives at 0 and 1 are both zero.
Therefore, something like this:

#declare ff = clock*clock*(3-2*clock)
sphere { ff*y, 0.2 }

produces a sphere that starts stationary at <0,0,0> when clock=0, and
finishes stationary at <0,1,0> when clock=1. I used this kind of trick
a number of times in my animation. One example is towards the end, when
the camera pans around the tortoise. Basically, I use:

camera { ...  rotate 360*ff*x }

to get a pan that does not seem to jerk at the beginning and end.

Acknowledgements:
I want to acknowledge my Lord Jesus Christ, who helped make sure that
the scenes worked out ok, especially those for which I didn't have time
for a second try! And for making sure my itchy fingers didn't delete
certain files I only _thought_ I wouldn't need again...