EMAIL: zorque@davlin.net
NAME: Mike McBain
TOPIC: "The End of..."
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: The end of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse
COUNTRY: United States of America
WEBPAGE: www.davlin.net/users/zorque
RENDERER USED: Hash's Animation Master, v10.5o
TOOLS USED: avi2mpg1 (mpeg converter), adobe AE (frames to avi)
CREATION TIME: about a month
HARDWARE USED: PC - AMD 2000+ (1.7GHz), 1GIG PC133 RAM
VIEWING RECOMMENDATION: some systems show video dark, requiring raising your gamma / brightness.

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: In 1999, the Cape Hatteras lighthouse had to be moved to escape a dangerously close erosion of the shoreline. This animation tries to show what would have happened if it hadn't been saved.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: Originally this animation was supposed to be much more detailed, including rain, splashing, and individual blades of grass. Unfortunately, two circumstances ruined this: 1)the added particles for rain, splash, and grass, slowed the renderer down to the point where I would never be able to finish rendering before the deadline. 2) the mpeg encoder I used had such poor image quality once I got my size down that the rain and grass look ugly anyways. So just pretend it's raining and there's grass, k?
The only real trick here is that there's a few different versions of the lighthouse. Seperate models for the exterior shots, interior shots, and the breakaway model. The mudslide was done with a pose slider (morph target, whatever). Entering the contest a month before the deadline really forced me to cut corners, but it was an excellent learning experience. I think I'll take the full 3 months next time :)