EMAIL: drthompson@iname.com
NAME: David Thompson
TOPIC: Inner Workings
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Inside Hut Six
COUNTRY: Australia
WEBPAGE: Coming Soon! (will advise in comments)
RENDERER USED: POVray 3.1g.watcom
TOOLS USED:
	Moray 3.2 for modelling, texturing and positioning
	Corel Draw 6 to create image maps
	Microsoft Photo Editor 97 to crop and smooth bitmaps
	Paint Shop Pro 5.02 to adjust material map palettes and create
	the movie poster
	Anvil Studio to compose the backing music
	Asymetrix Digital Video Producer to combine the animation frames
	and music into an .avi file, and to add the fades in and out
	avi2mpg1 1.7 to create the .mpg file
	Notepad to write this
CREATION TIME:
	Pretty much the whole 3 months.
	Rendering took 7 days 8 hours, MPEG conversion took 3 hours.
HARDWARE USED: PII 266 64Mb RAM
VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS:
	Media Player 6.4 works fine.
	Parts of the animation are a little bit dark, so its best viewed
	in full screen mode. Otherwise, make sure anything else on the
	screen is fairly dark - viewing on a white background makes it
	hard to see. A True Color display is also fairly important.
	You should probably mute the sound too, since its not part of
	the competition.
ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:
	The animation begins by approaching what appears to be a tiny
	hut in a snow-covered wasteland. We soon find out that the hut
	is merely an entrance to a vast underground complex containing
	things no-one would normally see. After observing some of the
	inner workings of the complex, and while waiting for the door 
	to the next section to open, we look back up towards the red
	glow of the hut that seemed to contain so little.

	The animation contains some "familiar faces" - see how many you
	recognise, and how many of each appear (answers below).
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:
	WHAT'S BEEN REUSED
	 - Many of the textures are based on the ones that come with
	   Moray (which are similar to some that come with POVray).
	 - The animation macros I developed for the Creatures round
	   (drtfrog.mpg) have been rewritten and reused.
	 - The idea to model R2D2 and VINcent came to me during the 
	   robots round, although I only got as far as a poorly modeled
	   top of VINcent's head, which I didn't use for this round. My
	   robots idea also had them in a different setting.
	 - The designs of the robots in the scene in the scene are
	   obviously not all mine:
		- R2D2 (3) is from "Star Wars" (of course). I used
		  the videos, a "Return of the Jedi" book, a colouring
		  book, a Mastering 3D Graphics tutorial, and various
		  toys (including original star wars R2D2 figurines) as
		  source material.
		- VINcent (2) is from "The Black Hole". I referred to
		  old colouring and sticker activity books. I would have
		  liked to include Old BOB or Maximillion, but I didn't
		  get time.
		- The red robot (3) ("UnknownRobot" in the source) is
		  from a cartoon called "Star Blazers" that used to be 
		  on ABC here in Australia. It was one of those cartoons
		  that had been dubbed over in English. The hero was
		  Derek Wildstar, the first big villian was the blue
		  skinned Deslock, but I cannot remember the robot's
		  name. I modeled it on a wind up toy.
		- The walking robot (2) ("KongBot" in the source) is
		  another plastic wind-up toy.
		- The Lego mover (2) is based on the one that is part of
		  "6893 Orion 2 Hyperspace Shuttle", which is new for
		  1987 (available in October). I don't have one, but I
		  do have a catalog.
		- The Engines are something like those found in the
		  Vampire jet fighter (but the model isn't very accurate)
		- The Missiles are loosely based on the GBU-15 CWW
		  (Cruciform Wing Weapon) used on the Vought A-7 Corsair
		  II for stand-off attack.
	WHAT'S NEW
	Everything else was created especially for this animation round.
	Original robot designs were:
	 - The fast moving Buggy (2)
	 - The tracked transporter (3)
	 - The tank (2)	
	CREATING THE ANIMATION
	Each of the three scenes (approaching, entering, and exploring
	the hut) were first modeled in Moray, with moving objects in
	their starting positions. The POV output from Moray was then
	combined with my animation macros to animate the scenes. Moving
	the objects in Moray, and using macros that showed curve paths
	in a scene, helped to fine tune the animation. Once everything
	moved alright, Moray was used to create fully textured scenes,
	and its POV output was combined with the animation code. Minor
	fixes were made to the final POVray version as defects became
	apparent from each rendering.
	LARGELY IRRELEVANT FACT
	Hut 6 at Bletchley Park is where the English worked on finding
	the daily keys to decrypt the German WWII land-based ENIGMA
	ciphers. The construction of the ENIGMA machine itself was
	first determined by Polish mathematicians some years before
	the war. The daily keys for the more complex Naval and Abwehr 
	versions of ENIGMA were studied in Huts 8 and 12.