TITLE: Robot Factory NAME: Dan Lauer COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: dlauer@optonline.net TOPIC: Robots COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. MPGFILE: djlrobot.mpg ZIPFILE: djlrobot.zip RENDERER USED: POVray 3.1.g TOOLS USED: POVray CMPEG Moray (to create the initial robot, before it was converted to a #macro) Microsoft Paintbrush to create the credits image_map. CREATION TIME: I started working on this animation on 11/1/99, the day after I submitted my "also-ran" entry into the "Horror" stills competition. I worked on it nearly every day for about an hour or two, usually while commuting to and from work. The total rendering time was about 80 hours, but its hard to be exact because some of it was done on other machines, and my primary machine is a laptop which I had to put into hibernate mode when walking to and from the train. HARDWARE USED: Pentium II, 366 MHz, 128Mb Pentium II, 400 MHz, 128Mb Pentium I, 133 MHz, 80Mb ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: It's just another day at the Robot Factory. Except that a slight mutation causes one of the normally green robots to come out blue. Fortunately, this does not prevent him from doing his job as an assembler before being shipped off to a satisfied customer. VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: Please set the viewer to "Play once and then stop, no rewind" to see the credits at the end. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: When I started this project, I wanted to do something that merged the typical cute humanoid sci-fi robot with the real-world efficient machines that are used in factories. As a programmer, I've always been interested in self-modifying code and genetic algorithms, so I tried to tie those concepts in as well. I completely developed the concept and the code for the whole scene before I had figured out a creative way to "photograph" it. From a creative, (as opposed to technical,) point of view, that was probably the most difficult part. I used Moray to model the first robot, then exported it, and did the rest of the coding directly in POVray. The key there was to convert it to a macro that gave me full control of its arms, hands, leg, foot, head, eyes, lights and color. The real trick to the whole animation is a few cyclical clock time variables and cycle counters. There is a total of 21 robots that are coded in a cyclical fashion. However, instead of having each cycle end where it starts as would normally be done, I have one robot's sequence end exactly where the next one's begins. This gives the illusion of having each robot move continuously through the whole assembly line. This illusion is enhanced by having the robot color being dependent on the clock cycle counter. If you have any questions as to how any of this was done, please feel free to e-mail me. OTHER CREDITS: - Chris Colefax for his SPLINE.INC files that I used for camera motion. - Chris Huff for his useful macros in objutil.inc and miscutil.inc. - Peter Houston, creator of Blob Man. Although none of his code was used here directly, the BlobMan macros provided inspiration for my MrRobot macro - To the POVray Team for their usual excellence. - To Erin Garlock, winner of the previous competition, whose quick response to a request for last minute advice on how to increase the compression of an MPEG file was absolutely essential. - To my wonderful wife, who after being ignored for two months while I worked on this, offered her advertising experience to help me "tell the story" in roughly 60 seconds. Without her creative editing, the think the whole point would have been missed. NOTE: The fedex_pak.gif file was ripped from the www.fedex.com web site. It is used without explicit permission. I used it in an attempt to show the irony that, if the day comes when robots build robot, they might still be shipped in the ubiquitous FedEx pack. I can only assume that if they care at all, they will only take it as a complement. I am in no way associated with the FedEx company, and in no way derive any benefit in promoting them in the IRTC.