TITLE: Fire Flies NAME: Peter Shafer COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: dearmad@teleport.com WEBPAGE: http:/www.teleport.com/~dearmad TOPIC: Pursuit/Escape COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. MPGFILE: Firefly.mpg RENDERER USED: POLYRAY v1.8(DOS) (A contemporary of POV v2.x) TOOLS USED: Tweener (my own utility) for animation assistance, MORAY v2.02 DOS for most of my modeling, Sketchpad, crayons, and water color pencils for concept art (2 days worth before I touched the computer), my Wife for loads of ideas, PSP v5 for end title screen, a calculator for a LOT of math! Goldwave for all soundtrack recording and mixing, finally Bink for sound mix-in and conversion to AVI and AVI2MPG for final compression. CREATION TIME: Forty days (nearly full-time). About 50 hours of rendering time. HARDWARE USED: PII350 Memory peaked at only 10MB's. VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: It is meant to be a night scene, so of course balancing darkness with light was very tricky. You may have to adjust your monitor a little, as we all have our own preferences, however there *are* details in the darker parts, so if it's too dark, please adjust!. And if you have sound, *please* listen as the animation is timed to the soundtrack. ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: Three girls pursuing fire flies through the night. Capturing them and then letting them ESCAPE into a beautiful evening sky! These are big cartoon fireflies, and a few unexpected events occur. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: All models are original and created entirely for this animation. I began by thinking about color choice as I wanted a limited amount of colors and a lot of complementary colors (meaning echoes of one object's colors showing up in another completely different object) that would help unify the "look" of the piece. I raided my daughter's crayon box, grabbed 5 colors and used them exclusively (only mixing allowed). Obviously, with crayons in my hand, I was not going for photo realism but a "cartoonish" look, however not a flat cartoon look, I wanted to take advantage of the 3D medium I would be working in. I designed the characters on paper, including the fireflies, which went through many versions until becoming what they are. The girls I spent about two days designing and failing to come up with the sort of "look" I wanted until I stumbled upon a simple "S" curve shape that perfectly captured the blond girl's face, and from there I developed their bodies, limbs, and dresses. I spent a day coloring them and sketching them over and over until I understood how I wanted them to "read" on screen and how I wanted the colors they shared to relate. I then set up a forward kinematic (one day I'll switch to the WIN Moray and use inverse kinematics -sigh-) model for each character in MORAY which went really easily because I had it all designed on paper. I created a soundtrack, recording and mixing what I needed. This took a few days- not as easy to record crickets as you might think (I ended up looping the crickets but vary the volume to add interest), piano was easy in comparison. I mixed the sound down to 45 seconds worth, and plotted each scene to coordinate with the sound. Once I had my scenes planned I modeled the remaining incidental items I needed for props (flashlight, etc...) and then created the little world upon which the short drama would take place. The stars are actually little spheres (1000+) strewn about the sky- I used a little utility I programmed for that. The ground is not a height field but a Bezier patch. It had a nicer look. I used spline pathing for movement, including when the blond girl skips and flies and when the red head walks around a tree. Obviously loads for the fireflies. I programmed this as an option into Tweener which is my in-betweening program I developed to make life a lot easier. While I programmed Tweener long ago, I had to go through it and reprogram about 25% of it for this animation (1 week worth of solid programming). Tweener is better for it and next animation I do should go more smoothly. The water splash is a particle generator with appropriately hand-coded vectors for the directions, about 300 blobs, and one day's work for testing. I set up each scene and then put the script files through Tweener, made motion-style adjustments in there and linked splines to objects, then exported them again as .PI files (Polyray script) and hand- tweaked the details, then set it loose at night so my computer had sweet dreams. Acknowledgments: This animation would have been impossible but for my wife's ideas during one night at a tea house. She's responsible for more in this animation than I can remember. Including being stubborn enough to insist on better compression for the final submission so that I improved the final look about 100% by using every trick I know. Now that it's all done, I owe her a considerable amount of my time. And yes, my wife is the red head.