EMAIL: dcuny@lanset.com
NAME: David Cuny
TOPIC: Dancing with Moai
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Dancing with Moai
COUNTRY: United States
WEBPAGE: webs.lanset.com/dcuny/home.htm
RENDERER USED: Inyo
TOOLS USED: JPatch, Inyo, RADTools, Wine, Audacity, Papagayo, Gimp, TMPGenc
CREATION TIME: 18 hours to render the final animation.
HARDWARE USED: AMD Athlon(tm), 1200Mhz, 1.5 Gig memory
VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: There's an audio track, too.
ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:

Once again, the Moai are confronted with a topic which they are ill-equipped to handle. The animation refers to a submission by Sascha Lendinsky from the October-January 2005 animation submission.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:

JPatch (http://www.jpatch.com) is an free, Open Source spline based 3D modeling and animation program written in Java by Sascha Ledinsky.

Inyo (http://inyo.sourceforge.net) is a raytracer I wrote for JPatch specifically to support global illumination effects - path tracing, ambient occlusion, image-based lighting, and so on. These features generally require large amounts of time to render, so (of course) they weren't used in this animation.

Vocals were created in Audacity. Saying that Linux isn't user-friendly when it comes to audio is an understatment! I recorded my sons on the vocals, and played the guitar myself. The sound effects were found via Google on free sound effects sites, and added as separate tracks. Audacity kept crashing when I did this in Linux, so I had to complete the audio compositing in Windows.

The models are built from spline-based patches in JPatch, primarily using the Extrude and Lathe functions. The head, face, eyes, ears, body and mouths are each separate parts. I created the various morphs for different expressions, and rigged the models with bones.

I had intended on using a Java program I had written for lipsync, but again ran into trouble getting it to work under Linux. With the deadline only a few days away, I decided to use Lost Marble's free Papagayo program (http://www.lostmarble.com/papagayo/index.shtml) instead. Papagayo generates a humanly readable xsheet, and JPatch stores animations in XML format, so importing the lipsync into JPatch was pretty much a matter of cut and paste using a text editor (I used KWrite).

The "character" animation is a mix of bone and morph animation, done in the JPatch animation module. 

JPatch can output to a number of different renderers. I used JPatch's PreViz renderer to generate quick test animations to test the lipsync. JPatch generates frames in the form of .PNG files, which have to converted to video. Using Wine to run RADTools (http://www.radgametools.com/bnkdown.htm) under Linux, I was able to convert the frames generated by JPatch into an .AVI file. Again using Wine, I used TMPGEnc to convert the .AVI files into .MPG, as well as add the audio.

For the title card, I grabbed a frame from the animation, and used KolourPaint to create a title card and end card.

I'd written a custom Java application that takes input scripts for processing frames. It supports a number of effects, including subtitles (code borrowed from Sascha), and various transitions such as wipes, fades and iris in/out. The script took the frames and added the transitions between the title cards and the animation.

If you've got any questions about the animation, feel free to send me an email.