EMAIL: cnichol@magma.ca NAME: Cory Nichol TOPIC: Robot COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Team Beanie COUNTRY: Canada RENDERER USED: povray 3.1 TOOLS USED: Moray, cmpeg CREATION TIME: 6.5 Hours HARDWARE USED: Pentium III 550 VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: Windows Media Player did an OK job. ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: This animation show 2 groups of 6 robots working away, using gears to combine their efforts. When the camera pulls back, you see that all that effort is to turn the propeller on the top of the large robot's beanie. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: This topic sparked my interest. I have never submitted anything to either the stills or the animation competition. I had this idea to have a bunch of small robots working away inside a large robot. Later, I came up with the idea of making them doing something trivial (turning the propeller). I am actually quite pleased how much programming is in the pov scene descriptions for my animation. The whole animation (except the title) can be rendered from the main.ini. Each robot was created in Moray. Robot1 (on the crank) was the toughest. The motion of the arms took a very long time to get correct. Take a look at the source. I had to use the Law of Cosines to get the degrees to bend the elbow. Robot2 (tank guy pushing axle) was also an exercise in math. I wanted to make sure that the tread moved the same amount as the floor under the robot. But the code I made is now fairly portable. The tread could be added to any scene, and made to work on any device. Robot3 (big guy wearing the hat) is the simplest one. He just smiles at the end. The gears were created from a base include file created by Marc Schimmler. However, the base gears are a little plain, so I put them in a CSG to add some detail. The bridge is almost pure code. I was unhappy with the robots being directly on the floor. Besides, if the hat was lifted off, then the robots should be on a structure that obviously goes with the hat. The path that the camera takes was coded as an include file. This allowed me to test he camera path by rendering an animation with a sphere at the camera location and another sphere at the camera look position. This allowed me to make sure that the motion was smooth. campath1 was the file used. campath was first attempt. But the camera moved too much, and made the animation far too large. I have included the source code for the whole animation.. Comments would be appreciated.