EMAIL: NAME: Helge Bahmann TOPIC: Dance COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Danse Macabre COUNTRY: Germany WEBPAGE: http://www.chaoticmind.net/~hcb RENDERER USED: Povray 3.6 (Debian Etch) TOOLS USED: Python, Gimp, Text editor, Rosegarden, timidyt, mjpeg tools, lame, brain CREATION TIME: 14 days modelling; 20 hours rendering HARDWARE USED: Dual Opteron 240 VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: vlc (VideoLan Client) works fine ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: During the night two skeletons awake on the graveyard and dance their last tango. Contains an audio track. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: The first thing that immediately came into my mind for the topic "Dance" is Tango Argentino; the second thing that came into my mind is Camille-Saint-Saëns' dance of the fossils. With these ideas in mind I first used Rosegarden to create the music -- yes I know the competition is about raytracing, but it was by far the easist part -- by combining "Fossils" with the traditional tango "El Choclo". After that I choreographed a small sequence of (very basic) Tango Argentino steps. This was by far the most fun part of the project as I had to dance through my appartment, putting paper marks on the ground to note where I stepped. Then I created all models (skeletons, graveyard etc.) in Povray with CSG; the only notable exception is the skull head, for which I used jpatch (www.patch.com) and exported it as a povray mesh. The models were then made "posable" by sprinkling statements such as "transform {L_WRIST}" through the model at strategic places. I then improvised a "small set" (~1500 lines) of python scripts to pose the models; since the scripts have grown with their task they are now quite capable, I intend to release them separately. I have put up a screenshot of what the pose assistor looks like at http://www.chaoticmind.net/~hcb/irtc/pose_assist.png For the tango I posed small "step sequences" of 10-20 frames each; these "basic" steps were then combined into the dance sequence as seen in the film with yet another python script. The other animation sequences were created "in one piece". Intro and outtro where created using gimp and python+imlib. Finally, everything was encoded and assembled using mjpegtools. Syncing video and audio caused some head scratching but worked out well in the end. Overall I am pleased with the animation, though I had something more ambituous in mind at the beginning. I regretfully do not include sources this time because they are a) a mess, and b) in their present form way too big (every pose is represented as a single povray include file - sources are around 8MB). However if you are interested in certain parts of them, just drop me a mail. Attributions: For the soundtrack I used clips licensed under the "CC sampling plus" license from the freesound project (refer to http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/ for details).