EMAIL: pterandon@yahoo.com
NAME: Greg M. Johnson
TOPIC: The End of...
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: The End of the Man from M.I.M.E.?
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/pterandon/anims.html
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5

TOOLS USED:  
	Modeller: Povray 3.5, "a raytracer, not a modeller."
	Sound editing & timing: Audacity
	MPEG composing & optimization: TMPENc
	Creation of chairs: Hamapatch

CREATION TIME:  the whole contest period.  Render time was about 7 h, 
enabling me to make 40+ drafts over the contest period.  (I had a plot in mind before the contest period but of course the end product turned out to be completely different). 

HARDWARE USED: Aptiva 2.8 GHz

VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS:  Suspension of disbelief. (Probably not good enough to view fullscreen).

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: A surrealistic cross between a spy/ superhero flick and any evaluation process.  The villains want to bring about "The End of ..." the good guy; the evaluators want to get to "The End of ..." a bad movie / an aggravating review of a poor performer.  Any parody involved is tongue-in-cheek, not out of any sense of bitterness.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:
THANKS TO:   
Ryan S. Johnson (my nephew) for making the original soundtrack and giving permission to use;
My wife for feedback on some of the grossest errors in early versions;
My son for general exuberance;
The crew at news.povray.org for advice on overcoming multiple technical difficulties over the years.


There are six characters in the animation.  The green (1) and steel-blue (2) ones allowed me to indulge in a bit of nostalgia, as they were created years ago when the level of sophistication (IMNSHO) in my POV-Ray blob characters was no where it is today.  The Man from M.I.M.E. (3) character and the human villain in olive green  (4) (tenatively named Dr. Palein), also POV-Ray blobs, were used in my last entry, albeit with improvements for nonlinear movement.  The red robots (5) are procedurally generated from a list of points for the joints in a human body, and use the same walk cycle file that I've used for the human in the last round.  And of course there's a gold CSG robot (6). 

I believe that I was able to achieve a higher level of polish in this anim compared to other entries because of smarter use of lighting and simpler setting (backdrop) which both allowed for a quick render.

KNOWN PROBLEMS: 
1) The arm swing of the hero during his punch of the robot has at least two problems 
i) It pauses mid stroke.  This is a necessary flaw in my "non-linear" movement algorithm: it's a royal pain to turn off.  Fixing it would have involved another manmonth of coding.
ii) The elbow flits around either goofily or unrealstically.  I have to animate the elbow orientation vector as a separate variable, and with the torso twisted around several tens of degrees about the y axis, this too became a math headache.  I'm sure the last-minute attempt to address this problem will have created a few new ones. ;-p

2) Unpleasant pixelation of screen raster.  I think I could have fixed it with another render or two

3) One of the character's hands intersects the table while voting.

4) Probably too many compression artifacts from MPEG encoding.  I spent weeks optimizing a version that turned out to be 11,298,820 bytes and had to scrunch it a bit at the last minute.