TITLE: Astroid Life
NAME: Erik Shelley
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: shellerik@yahoo.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.erikshelley.com/
TOPIC: Evolution
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: astrlife.mpg
ZIPFILE: astrlife.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-RAY 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    ActivePerl 5.8.0.806, Dave's Targa Animator, avi2mpg1

CREATION TIME: 
    2-3 weeks

HARDWARE USED: 
    1.73 GHz AMD

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 


A lifeform is born in an astroid field. It is different than it's peers. The
difference seems to help it survive. 
It passes on this diffence to its offspring.


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
    Works in Windows Media Player

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


The planet, astroids, and lifeforms are all really simple. The interesting part
was placing and moving so many objects. I
decided to use perl to generate the pov scene. I wrote a script to position the
objects and the camera and to make sure 
there were no collisions. I didn't give myself enough time to do what I
originally envisioned but I did manage to get 
enough finished to convey the main ideas.

The astroids are isosurfaces using function { f_sphere(x,y,z,1) +
f_wrinkles(x+rmod,y+rmod,z+rmod) } where rmod is a 
random number generated for each astroid.

The final animation was 1300 frames which took almost 24 hours to parse and
trace without antialiasing. I didn't have time
to do the whole thing with antialiasing so I had to cut the number of frames in
half. It took about 40 hours to create the
final animation. The perl script and pov scene are really a mess so I decided
not to provide them. I don't think there is 
anything to be learned from them.