EMAIL: tfaulkes@hotmail.com
NAME: Tim Faulkes
TOPIC: Force
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: A force to reckon with.
COUNTRY: Australia
WEBPAGE: 
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.1
TOOLS USED: CMPeg, Firehand Ember
CREATION TIME: 6 days rendering time
HARDWARE USED: 733 MHz PIII and 1GHz P4
VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS:

The monitor gamma setting might need to be adjusted on some displays.
It looks fine on most monitors I tried it on, but was slightly dark
on a couple until their gamma setting were adjusted. Played with Windows
Media Player works fine, except the animation time displayed is wrong.

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:

A large force of warriors goes to lay seige to a castle guarded only
by a wizard.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:

This animation was created with the standard POVRAY animation support, and
a lot of macros. The individual scenes were created and rendered as animations
until I was happy with them (in low resolution -- 160x120) and then joined them
together by altering the POV source. This meant that the final render of the
whole animation could be done as one very large rendering. I did make a mistake
which caused the "relative" time to be different between the small animation pieces and
the real animation which was very annoying.

The only tool I used besides CMPeg to encode the animation was Firehand Ember Pro
to manage the individual frames. Got to get some better tools, so I can render
the final images, keep them in one place and then just join them together without
rendering them again.

As this was my first major animation, I did a few mistakes. I never rendered
the final animation in full size until the final render, resulting in an 
animation size that was too large, and had to be cut back. I started the large
render before I was perfectly happy with the small render, and resulted in 
needing to re-render some frames. And I started the final render too late in
the piece, so I was very stressed about when it would finish. (But it did take
six days to render!)


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

Many thanks to Chris Colefax for his brilliant object exploder macro, which
was used to create the exploding catapult boulder shot.

Many thanks to Peter Houston (and thus also Govert Zoethout) for the BlobMan
macro. Although I did not use this macro in this animation, I derived many
great ideas from their work. (Yes, the head and hands are my own macros...)