EMAIL: pdolan@jps.net
NAME: Peter Dolan
TOPIC: Life
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: That's Life
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: www.jps.net/bdolan/
RENDERER USED: 3D Studio Max R3 default renderer
TOOLS USED:
	Photoshop 5.0 -- mapping
	3D Studio Max R3 -- modeling/animation
	Adobe Premier 5.0 -- compiling of still images
	AVI2MPG1 -- conversion to MPEG
CREATION TIME: about 3 days
HARDWARE USED: PIII500, 128MB RAM, W98
VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS:
	Don't fall asleep, I use standard windows media player in fullscreen mode
ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:
	The life of a fish
	1st scene: swimming in circles
	2nd scene: swimming in circles
	3rd scene: highlight of the day (paper gets blown in the breeze)
	4th scene: swimming in circles
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATIONS WA CREATED:

I started with a picture of a fish from the internet, from there I modeled the fish body using surface tools (splines), and the fins using NURBS surfaces, the bump/color/specularity maps were drawn in Photoshop with the original picture as a guide.  The fins were mapped using a gradient to define color and transparency based on how "elevated" the surface was from "zero height."  Animation was done primarily with block controllers until I discovered that they tended to make my computer lock up (every 10 minutes or so... gets annoying to say the least) and the movement to do weird stuff, and so I resorted to the standard copy-paste of keyframes.  I'm especially pleased with the lighting in the scene -- I'm happy that the "radiosity" lights (behind the walls, shadowless) worked so well to provide a daylight atmosphere.  I was originally going to have the fishbowl refract as well as reflect, but I realized that I wasn't patient enough to render 1427 frames at 10 minutes a frame! :)

Dedicated to Rachel, thank you.