TITLE: Watch
MPGFILE: watch.mpg


NAME: Tomasz Machnik
COUNTRY: Poland

EMAIL: tomaszm@timsi.com.pl
WEBPAGE: http://www.bizon.3d.pl

TOPIC: Inner Workings
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: watch.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    LightWave 6.0b


TOOLS USED: 
    LightWave 6.0b , After Effects 4.0 , Avi2Mpeg 1.11


CREATION TIME: 
    one week
All this stuff  has been modeled during the day and rendered overnight. One
frame took in average 2 minutes to render.

VIEWING RECOMMENDATION:  Full color ; 30 frames per second - Windows MediaPlayer
seems to be OK
As you can see there are some strange black dots in the fog inside the watch. I
don't know why they are there but they shouldn't be - I'm sure it wasn't my
fault... maybe a GroundFog bug ?


HARDWARE USED: 
    Celeron266@448 ; 64MB RAM ; pretty old Permedia2 8MB card.


ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 

Watch and its gears , dust , gears , hands and some gears... - is it really work
in that way ?


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 

Well... I'm not a great animator - basically until now I've been only modeling
some strange stuff  just for my own pleasure. So finally it's about time to
improve my animation skills.
I'd modeled The Watch some time ago but with no works inside it; besides, it had
to be modified. There were many shortcuts involved, especially within the
materials configuration
- I had to use more tricks instead demanding raytracing because with typical
setup it would take about 4 minutes to render one frame and then there would be
no chance I could finish the project on time. 
What else? Do you like the falling rope-ladder ? I know that the object should
be more detailed, but  even by such level of complexity  the calculations were
taking too long so I had to turn off "self-collision detection". 
Two plugins included into the package were used in animation process : Motion
Designer (falling rope-ladder) and Oscillator (all the swinging movements).
I also used Expressions to put  the watch's hands and gears in motion. The dusty
atmosphere inside the watch was created with "ground fog" function.
Initially I planned to change camera position more often to make the animation
more vivid. I also wanted to put two ants in it (yes , those little workoholic
ants) and some background music as well, but...
Maybe in the next version -))