TITLE: Life ain't nothing but a Bubble
NAME: Frank Haut
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: Frank.Haut@t-online.de
WEBPAGE: Mouse-Power.de

TOPIC: DECAY
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: bubbles.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    3D Studio, Highlight Professional

TOOLS USED: 
    ULead Media Studio 2.5, Micrografx Picture Publisher, Adobe
Photoshop, Avi2MPEG

CREATION TIME: 
    Several Months, but hard to say how many hours it was exactly,
because I have very
little sparetime and mostly can only afford to work on it for a quick hour in
between, if at all. 

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium II 350, 128 MB used with 3D Studio in the office / AMD K6
233, 64 MB used at Home

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 

The animation shows in a metaphorical and not too serious way the genesis and
end of mankind. You
see god and the creation of the earth in a somewhat simplified way using
soapbubbles. Then the
camera focuses on the planet earth, zoomes in a little, showing the creation and
growth of Cities,
the technical progress (illustrated by a plane, a jumbo, a rocket, a space
shuttle and satellites) and 
the destruction of the environment (illustrated by two fires and the darkening
of the oceans and 
landmasses). Lastly planet earth collapses and leaves behind a sad god thinking
about what went wrong.

One thing left to say is: Originaly I did not make this animation for the IRTC,
but I saw it as a
training and maybe a part of future applications. The reason is that when I
approach a company as a
3D Designer, I'm only told that I use the wrong tools and should come back when
I have some experience
with 3D Studio or Softimage etc. Thanks God my Employee Ubisoft Germany, where I
translate Computer
Games into german, was so kind to allow me the usage of their version of 3D
Studio in times when the 
graphist didn't need his PC (and, of course, after work). This is the very first
project I did with 3D 
Studio. By coincidence the IRTC announced the topic DECAY just when I was in the
final phase of this 
project and I was happy that it perfectly fit. But as I didn't originaly made it
for the IRTC, the 
animation of course became too big to submit it. So I made a smaller version of
it, leaving away the 
Sounds and the music as well as cutting off whole scenes. The longer Version,
however, is still 
available for download if you like. I do recommend it, because the few more
seconds, the sound and 
especially the music really add to this animation. You may download it from my
site www.mouse-power.de.



VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 

I recommend to use the option "Stop after playing", because the Title of this
animation consists of
a single Frame only (last Frame), and otherwise you will not see who had the
fantastic idea for this
peace of Animation. The Windows Mediaplayer works fine.  

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 

First of all I created the Character. The old Man (or God) consists of a body, 2
feet, one moveable arm
and a Head with moveable eyes and mouth. As this was the first project made with
3D Studio, I decided not
to use NURBS or any Plugins for the creation. I built up everything from
standard-primitives instead, because
this is closer to the way I used to work. For the creation of the face I used
two paperbased images as a 
modell (you can also download them on my website). After a while I noticed that
a moving mouth would add
a lot to the animation, and so I cut out a mouthhole with a boolean function and
added a moveable Mouth and
Beard. This of course only grants a very limited moveability, but works quite
fine. 
Then I started making the bubbles (standard-spheres with a noise-function) and
the first textures. Next step was 
to create a animated texture for the planets (in the short version only biggest
one for the earth is visible).
I did this at home with my Media Studio 2.5 Morph Editor and hand-drawn maps.
When I was satisfied, I started
making the Objects on the earth. The Cities (there are only two different
types), the rocket, the satellites and
even more, if the System wouldn't already have reached it's limits. But there
still were a few things which I really
wanted to add (for example the planes, the spaceshuttle), so I made them with my
Renderer at home 
(Highlight professional) and added them later via the overlay-function of Media
Studio.
At the end (I mean when there was little time left to submit it to the IRTC) I
rendered the animation
over several nights, burned a CD and took it home with me. At home I added the
Overlays I have mentioned above 
as well as the sound FX and the music (neither of them is audible in the version
I submitted). Most Sounds
come from a CD with free Sounds, some are selfmade and the music was taken from
an old record from my archive
(unfortunately I don't have the right to use it).
It was no surprise to see that the animation with sound exceeded the 5 MB
barrier, so I tried and tried until 
I had a version that was below 5 MB. However, as I already mentioned, the Sound,
the music and some small scenes 
got lost in that process and the bitrate of 90 KB/s is sure not ideal. But you
may download 
the full version from: www.mouse-power.de