EMAIL: sshelby@shelbyvision.com
NAME: Steve Shelby 
TOPIC: Duel
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Duel for Eternity
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE:
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.5
TOOLS USED: Povray 3.5, Moray 3.5, and Videomach
CREATION TIME: Total render time was about 2 hours. Total time spent on the project was about 60 hours.
HARDWARE USED: 2Ghz Pentium4, 256Mb
VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: Any will do. 
ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: The eternal struggle of good and evil.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: I was originally inspired by an entry in the Jan. 2004 IRTC Animation Competion called "The End of good and Evil" by William de Beaumont. I wanted to represent the yin and yang in a three dimensional way. I didn't arrive at the final concept until about mid September, so I didn't get to refine it as much as I would have liked. Much credit has to go to Chris Colefax, for his great Povray tools: spline macro, and autoclock macro, without which I would not have been able to proceed.
The two worms are pipe splines, using the spline macro. I spent many hours plotting their points on graph paper, getting it wrong, trying again, etc., until I finally got it right. each spline has 18 points, each of which get translated many times, which taxed my little brain to its limit. I used Povray for everything, except a few times I used Moray to help with getting a texture right and experimenting with the fog. The plane in the scene has a simple white texture with normal wrinkles, and diffuse 1, specular 0.1, brilliance 5. It is overlaid by a thin layer of thick ground fog. I had first experimented with media for this, but it made render times so slow that I never would have gotten it done in time. I'm happy with the way it turned out; it has the etherial cloud-like quality I was going for.