TITLE: Mobile Home
NAME: Nazrat Durand
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: nazrat@athabascau.ca
TOPIC: Transportation
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: ndcastle.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-RAY 3.02


TOOLS USED: 
    cmpeg 1.0, LEGO, MicroMegablocks, TANDEM blocks,
             TYCO blocks.
A modified version of the the building brick library that
Filip Spacek <http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Park/6522/> modified for
POV-RAY from Paul Gyugyi <http://www.gyugyi.com> 
Rayshade library.


CREATION TIME: 
    Building the castle took weeks. It is annoying
  to build a tower and then find one of the bricks is floating
  in mid-air :-)


HARDWARE USED: 
    A 66 MHz 486 20MB was used to design the castle.
  Rendering was done on a 266 MHz Pentium II machine with 128 MB
  to which access was granted on the morning of the 15th of April.  


ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 


  A man's mobile home is his castle.  Tornadoes were in the news
when I was designing my castle, and one thing led to another.
I was wondering how a true mobile home would move around, and 
figured that arrivals and departures would depend on what world
the mobile home was arriving or departing from.  Unfortunately
for me, my vision greatly exceeded my skills.  I wanted to 
design unique worlds as well as a variety of locomotion, but 
time ran out.  I haven't even taken the time to count the 
bricks in the thing yet! 

 Only 265 frames used of over seven hundred rendered.



VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
    I used VMPEG.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


Each brick is positioned by translating by units of widr and
talr.  Using the clock to modify these values as well as 
rotating by clock values allow the various motions to occur.
I was going to have the castle fade in and out by varying 
the colours, but that will have to wait until next time.

One goody I would like to share with people, though.  There
is no combination of rotations and translations that will 
transform a left-hand object into a right-hand object.  For
those interested, here is a bit of code that will do so:

  #declare YZ_Mirror = transform {
     matrix < -1, 0, 0,
               0, 1, 0,
               0, 0, 1,
               0, 0, 0 >
     } 

  #declare Right_Hand_Object = object { Left_Hand_Object                        
     
                                 transform YZ_Mirror
                                 }

BTW:  #include <standard transform warning>;
      If your object is far from the YZ plane, you may 
      have to go hunting for its mirror twin.

It is amazing how much time can be saved on building the
right gate tower when the above transform is applied to
the left gate tower!  
(Left tower = 2 weeks ) 
(right tower = a couple-three days of agonizing, 
               an hour of Reading The Friendly Manual,
               a moment of inspiration,
               an hour of trial and error )