EMAIL: svalstad@sn.no
NAME: Stig M. Valstad
TOPIC: Metamorphosis
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Anthill at Unseen University
COUNTRY: Norway
WEBPAGE: http://www.sn.no/~svalstad
RENDERER USED: Polyray v1.8
TOOLS USED: ted, ImageMagick, PVRG MPEG codec.
CREATION TIME: ca. 20 hours rendering time
HARDWARE USED: AMD K6 210Mhz w/ 32 MB SDRAM. Umax scanner.
ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:

This is an anthill at Unseen University, Ankh-Morpork. The high
level of ambient magic make these ants evolve faster than they
would otherwise have done. I put a picture box in the room with
the anthill and commanded the imp to draw one image approximately
once every week. This is the result.

You might wonder why the rocket is just standing there, after
being built. Well, after they had put all that work into making
the rocket, they suddenly realized that there was a slight
problem - something called a roof.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:

First I made an include file "backg.inc" with everything that is
constant through the entire animation, i.e. the floor, the walls,
and the roof.

From then on I worked in parallel with two files; "objects.inc",
containing definitions for everything and "ant.pi" where I put
all the transient things in place and defined when they should
appear and disappear. I generally made about 50 frames at a time
and then copied "ant.pi" to "ant[0-9].pi" to continue working on
the next bit. I could have put everything into just one file, but
that would have been a bit more effort, and the source file would
be highly unreadable with loads of nested conditionals. By making
each object appear and disappear in different source files I
could use simple bounding_boxes to make them come gradually into
being like this:

high_house {
	bounding_box <-2, -1, -2>, <2, (relf-23.1)/4, 2>
	rotate <0, 20, 0>
	translate <-0.6, 0, 15.5>
	}

relf is defined as the current frame minus the starting frame of
the current bit of the animation. This house will start appearing
23 frames into the current section and grow by a quarter of one
unit for each frame.

Then in a later source file it will be removed in a similar way:

hut_a {
	bounding_box <-1, -1, -1>, <2, 11 - relf, 2>
	rotate <0, -70, 0>
	translate <3, 0, 9.3>
	}

This hut will be completely demolished 11 frames into the current
section.

The initial anthill is a sphere with an imagemap made by gluing
lots of leaves and little sticks and bits of paper and stuff to
a piece of paper and then scanning it.

The little brick_red hut was someting I made for another image
where I ended up not using it and is therefore rather more
detailed than necessary. The rest of the houses are just made
up of a handfull of simple primitives.

I used ImageMagick to convert each batch of frames to mpeg when
they were finished. Then in the end I used the PVRG-MPEG codec
from Stanford to convert all the little mpegs to one large mpeg.

All source files and the imagemap are included in the zip file.