TITLE: MACROSS (ROBOTECH)"Prepare for Battle!"
NAME: Teddy Nishiyama
COUNTRY: Japan
EMAIL: tnishi@ari.ncl.omron.co.jp
WEBPAGE: http://www.cs.oberlin.edu/students/nishiyam/default.html
TOPIC: Metamorphosis
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: macross.mpg
ZIPFILE: macross.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    povray for win 3.02

TOOLS USED: 
    moray, dta, videdit, avi2mpeg1

CREATION TIME: 
    3 weeks to model, about one week of on and off rendering.
A total of an hour or so to create the movie scenes and edit them together
and convert to mpeg.

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 133

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 


     Some may remember the Japanimation series that was shown on
American television many years ago (over 15 years ago?) called 
"Robotech" (japanese name "Macross").  This is my rendition of 
the VF-1 fighter getting ready for battle.  This fighter is modelled
after the one flown by Roy Faulker.  It's not perfect, but pretty close.


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


     The 3 hardest things about this animation was modelling the fighter 
so that all the parts were placed and moveable in a realistic manner, 
checking and rechecking the coordinates and the timing of the moving 
parts so that I don't have things running through eachother (at least 
the parts you can see), and finally calculating and programming the 
animation into the file.
     The model was created using Moray and was based on just 4 different 
images of the fighter that I was able to find.  From these images, I had
to imagine how the fighter transformed from fighter (jet) mode, to valkyrie 
(robot) mode.  I especially had problems with the arms.  It took forever 
to figure out how to store the arms when they're in fighter mode.  Oh, and 
I couldn't get the head right so it looks different than the actual animation,
but it's sort of close.  I modeled each part individually, like the hands, 
arms, legs, body, back/tail, wings and then scaled and merged them into a 
single model.  This whole process took about three weeks...half the time 
was figuring out and setting the local origin of each piece so they moved 
correctly in animation.  Sometimes I spent time bending my own arm, leg, 
or fingers to get a feel for what it SHOULD look like.
     Before going into the actual animation part, I added halos to the
jet exhaust and gun, a sky and ocean by hand.  I wanted to try my hand 
at landscape but I didn't have time.
     For the actual animation, I divided the transformation into separate 
scenes.  For each scene, I isolated the moving parts and checked the starting 
and ending angles and coordinates, and programmed the variables to increment 
or decrement betweeen the values.  I had to fix and rerender several of the
scenes because I found that some parts were moving the wrong direction or
the camera angle was wrong, etc. For the camera, I had completely different
angles for each of the scenes starting with the cockpit scene, but it 
looked quite choppy so I decided to make a smooth(?) camera transition 
through most of the scenes...looks a bit better.
     Because of the lack of time, I took the quickest and dirtiest approach
to get the animation working.  Basically, I didn't bother to create an include
file for the animation variables calculations and just added them at the
top of the pov file so it's quite messy and totally unreadable, but it works!
Though I rendered each scene individually, I have it set up so you can go set
the first and last frame of the whole animation and just let it render through
every single scene in one run.  The nice thing about this is that I could just
test render any portion of the animation by setting the frame number and not
have to worry about whether the right variables are set or not.  Considering
this is my first animation ever, I think it went pretty well.
     Each scene was made into a FLC movie with DTA and then converted to avi
using VidEdit and spliced together.  Finally, I used AVI2MPG1 to create the
final product.  There was no post-processing of any kind aside from the
conversions, so what you see is basically directly from povray.
     Overall I tried to give the animation a kind of a "Japanimation" flavor
to it by using a brightly colored sky, ocean, a single point light as a sun 
to produce harsh shadows as in hand drawn t.v. animations (also for quicker 
rendering) and a combination of relatively fast camera work in conjuntion 
with the transforming figure.