TITLE: Anthrosphinx vs. Wyngz: Pursuit-Escape NAME: Markus Altendorff COUNTRY: Germany EMAIL: ma.al@anthrosphinx.de WEBPAGE: http://www.anthrosphinx.de/ TOPIC: Pursuit/Escape COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. MPGFILE: maal_pe1.mpg RENDERER USED: Cinema 4D Net 6.2 TOOLS USED: (all on Mac) Cinema 4D XL 6.2, BodyPaint 3D, Adobe Premiere 5.1, GraphicConverter 4.0.1, Astarte M.Pack, PlayerPro 5.7, the SoundCube audio collection, the DataBecker Monster Pack audio collection. CREATION TIME: 2 hard months of countless after-hours... HARDWARE USED: Apple G4 450 MP, 640 MB RAM, for editing, plus a G4 450 with 512 MB RAM, a G3 350 with 384 MB RAM and a 7500/200 with 416 MB RAM. Modelling partially done on a Powerbook G3/400, but most of it on the Twin CPU box. ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: Allow me to introduce you to Amurel (species type: anthrosphinx, you know her from the previous animation round - and yes, she's definitely a *she*) and Wyngz (species type: humanoid photo-hemotroph), in a classic chase animation, including "Launching the spaceship", "Pursuit through the canyon", "Showdown" and "Aftermath". ;-) Featuring a soundtrack by yours truly. You may put your fingers in your ears any time now... ;-) VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: Works with standard Windows MPEG and MacOS Quicktime 2.5 to 5. You may want to change brightness/contrast on your monitor. I noted that playback is sometimes jerky under MacOS/QT4 and smoother under windows or MacOS/QT5b2 (YMMV). Full screen quality is sort of tolerable if you move a bit away from the screen. Sorry for the poor sound, too, MPEG simply took its toll... (especially when the engines sound and the drums come together...) DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: Pursuit/Escape was a topic that immediately flipped some switches, and a lot of friends came up with quite a few ideas, too: a human figure being chased by Death (the latter imagined like in the Terry Pratchett Discworld novels), or something running ahead of the seconds hand of a timepice, or... but this is about what it really ended up: I decided to animate yet another years-old airbrush design. The cat-creature ("Amurel") base model was carried over from my last round's entry, as were the ship and the mountain scene during the first sequence. The magnetic bones for Amurel underwent a major revision, though (i'm up to version 72 now...). First step was the modelling of the ship's bridge, which uses two programmed behaviours: the cage around the elevator, whose parts consist of cylinders that slide into each other, starting with the thinnest one; and the clamps on the pilot's stand that slide out until 80% of their height and then start to spin by 45 degrees through the last 20%; both use hierarchical animation and spin angle propagation related to an invisible "control" object. This was done in early December (on my notebook at our local computer club's regular's table ;-) Next step was the model of the flying creature ("Wyngz"). I used far less mesh points for this and let the surface subdivision do it's work. The pseudo-hair was a first for me, it's done by drawing irregular splines (as radial "intersections" of the hair) and placing them in a LOFT surface generator. I also tried a set of three semi-transparent hair parts on top of each other to simulate layers of hair, but decided it's not worth the render time penalty... (except for a few strands over the forehead). The loincloth uses the same technique as the hair (a surface built across several splines), but this time i drew freehand splines and used the "project to surface" function of Cinema. The tattoo-like spots (which are meant to be the creature's biological antigrav generator, that's why they glow in the dark - the wings are merely for propelling ;-) were painted on the mesh using BodyPaint, a tool that i've still got to get used to... The landscape for the chase scene started as a flat 100x100 polygon mesh. I painted irregular polygon selections on it and moved these up and down (no landscape generator involved). The "stone bridges" are made by selecting the base polys on each side of the canyon and using the "bridge" (doh! ;-) tool of Cinema, plus two subdividing cuts through the resulting bridge, forming a bow to make it look more natural. The texture is a mix of a very long stretched noise shader, plus a marble texture in the bump channel, plus a rough noise in the displacement channel. Plus a 3rd level surface subdivision at rendering time. Would not render on anything below 256 Megs of RAM... Lighting consists of three lights: a spot with hard shadows for the "sunlight", a parallel light source top-down without shadows and with a blue tone for the skylight and a parallel light source / no shadows bottom-up with a brownish tone (for the light reflected from the ground). The sky is a fisheye photo of a real cloud scene. The fog on the horizon is a very large torus with a fog shader, the intensity is set so that a straight look at it will swallow the ray completely, while looking upward will reveal part of the sky texture. The chase scene animation is rather straightforward: two splines through the scenery, attaching the object's motions to the splines and auto-adjusting the heading along the splines. Additional "dummy" objects were used to control the banking. Two cameras were set up as "buddycams", grouped with the ship/"wyngz" respectively. To make these views more interesting, these cameras change their angle relative to their parent object (instead of the impression of a "nailed to the target" behaviour). Two more cameras were attached to the spline motion paths, heading at "Wyngz", one 1/2 of a second behind, the other 4 frames ahead. Another camera was placed at the "cockpit" of the pursuing ship, and this output was used for the "in-ship" viewscreen. The aftermath scene makes use of the "stage" object of Cinema which allows to switch the active camera during the rendering process. This was also the first scene for which i used a timing script (i.e. i noted down WHAT should happen WHEN... instead of "well, let's see what happens when i set the control to this..." ;-) It's main light sources are the two volumetric light cones above the two creatures, plus a weak shadow-casting light source to the faces. The green lights along the pods are real light sources with a small radius, they merely light the legs. There's no real "lip-sync" (to what language, anyway? ;-), and i decided to stick with subtitles. All in all, it's some 5-6 minutes of raw material from over 20 cameras scattered around each scene. There was no way i could pack this into the 5 megs limit of the IRTC, so i made two versions of the movie, a "longplay" for my homepage in RealPlayer format (hint, hint ;-) and a 5-meg-MPEG1-version with shorter scene cuts and a lot of stuff missing... the "raw size" was 384x288, something that plays back well to VHS video tape, but for the 45 kB/sec data rate, i had to scale it down to 240x176 pixels for the MPEG - otherwise, the encoder would cancel with "data rate exceeded - try using a blur filter on the sequence" (*bad* idea...). This gave me 1 minute 52 seconds to encode, with an extra space of 40 unused kBytes (what a waste ;-). I decided to keep most of the final subtitles (although at twice the speed they were meant to be) to wrap up the short story instead of just squeezing as much rendered content in it as possible. The brightness/contrast was changed with a color area of mid-gray (128/128/128) at 10% opacity over the whole movie (effectively scaling it to brightness levels 6-250), because i noticed that MPEG encoding tends to increase the contrast (so it's best to remove some of it beforehand). Depending on your video card, the movie may play back too bright (especially on TFT displays and/or ATI boards). This is especially true for the hardware-accelerated MPEG playback on ATI/Macintosh, where even black is rendered as mid-gray (!) - try opening another MPEG file, so that hardware acceleration is turned off, you'll see the difference! The audio part is set at minimum data rate (32 kBit/sec), and it sounds awful... but it's there! The whole topic - pursuit/escape - screamed for fast cuts and short sequences (plus a fast-paced soundtrack, although the competition is not about sound - i'm thankful for this ;-) ), so i settled for a duration of two to three seconds for each cut in the video editing program. For the IRTC version, i had to take this down to one or two seconds, and i had to throw out a lot of stuff (the aftermath "dialogue" is much shorter, and there are a lot of scenes missing during the chase and while preparing the ship for launch). Even though audio is not required, i've noted it's able to intensify the optical experience ;-) so i spent some 20 hours struggling with sequencer software (if you think i'm not that good with 3-D, then you haven't heard me composing ;-) until i found some right mix of a) putting pre-made sounds together and b) occasionally/accidentally pressing a key on a keyboard... (the "hand clap" for example ;-) Some sidenotes: * I've found a memory leak with the Mac multiprocessor version of Cinema - ever started a render process at 2 a.m. in the morning to find out 10 hours later that it made exactly 5 frames and came to a grinding halt with "out of memory" 10 minutes after you went to sleep? Workaround: assign a gigabyte of VM, then give the gigabyte to the renderer, and let the memory leaks accumulate in the VM storage. With luck, this results in enough time for the renderer to finish the current sequence... * Another odd thing: depending on the angle of "Wyngz"' head bones, the rendering times go straight through the roof: from 1min30secs pre frame (at 384x288) to an impressive 4 hours... and it's not just part of the image that slows down the renderer, it's that slow *throughout* the frame... Well, that's about all i remember about this... Have fun (and maybe see y'all again in another round) Markus Altendorff