TITLE: Caelum
NAME: Tekno Frannansa
COUNTRY: UK
EMAIL: tek@evilsuperbrain.com
WEBPAGE: www.evilsuperbrain.com
TOPIC: Pursuit/Escape
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: caelum.mpg
ZIPFILE: caelum.zip
RENDERER USED: 

        POV-Ray 3.1g


TOOLS USED: 

        Paint Shop Pro 5
        CMPEG


CREATION TIME: 

        Approx 44 hours for final render.


HARDWARE USED: 

        PentiumIII 550MHz 256MB RAM


ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 


A wanted ship gets chased by the police, only to lose them using some daredevil
flying.

The rather bizarre title for this animation came from me putting "sky" into an
on-line English to Latin dictionary.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


I tried to make an animation for the previous round, "Alien Invasion" and did
just about
everything in the wrong order. With that one I started by spending ages creating
a really
nice spaceship model, then wrote a program to model the physics of it flying,
and then
discovered it was really hard to get it to follow any kind of script. I learnt a
lot from
that.

With this one, I started by story boarding the animation, noting possible edits
and extra
bits that could be added later. Then I created an extremely simplistic render of
the main
three scenes, concentrating on the motion. In fact, until two weeks ago all I
had was an
animation of a black triangle chasing a white triangle over a checkered floor
and between
two boxes. Next I built the models for the various elements of the scene, and
finally I
traced a few simple extra scenes to add to the feel of the whole animation.

My original idea was to have two birds chasing each other over a natural
landscape and
through a canyon. I decided not to use birds because I only had 2 weeks to build
the
models in and birds are really complex. The city came about as a result of me
playing
Final Fantasy 8 on my playstation (a truly beautiful game), in which I'd just
reached the
city of Esthar, which consists mostly of hi-tech blue buildings. I decided that
would look
much more spectacular than a natural scene, though I must confess my feeble
attempts don't
look anywhere near as good as my source of inspiration. The white spaceship was
the one I
had developed for my aforementioned attempt at animation, with different
textures. The
police ship is entirely my own work, though it's rather obviously inspired by
the stealth
bomber.

I'm particularly proud of a blend function that I came up with, allowing me to
smoothly
interpolate between different simple motions, producing the dramatic sweeping
movement of
the vehicles.

I would have liked to spend more time on this animation, unfortunately I decided
to enter
the stills competition as well (subject: contrast), so my free time was split
between the
two. Still, I'm fairly pleased with the result, not bad for my first proper
animation.