TITLE: PAKUPAKU NAME: Anthony Harel COUNTRY: France/Japan EMAIL: aharel@tkg.att.ne.jp WEBPAGE: none yetMPGFILE: pakupaku.mpg TOPIC: Pursuit/Escape COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT MPGFILE: pakupaku.mpg RENDERER USED: Pov-Ray 3.1g TOOLS USED: sPatch for the ghosts MOVRay 3.2 and POV-Ray 3.1g for the rest of the design Chris Colefax' clock macros for most of the animation POV-Ray 3.1g for rendering Paint Shop Pro 5 for the end title and the image maps Bmp2Avi, TMPGEnc for the creation of the mpg CREATION TIME: About 7 hours. HARDWARE USED: Pentium Celeron 433Mhz 192Mb RAM ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: Pursued by ghosts in a maze... (Please stop here and watch the animation before reading the end) VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: Windows Media Player is OK. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: The theme rang 2 bells in my mind: a pursuit in a maze and the prey becoming hunter. The PacMan idea came naturally about 3 seconds later. I started by designing the maze itself and wrote a storyboard. I first worked out the basics of movements of the first scene by moving simple shapes in the maze, in order to get an idea of the final product. -The first ghost was merely a big ugly red cylinder!- I then created the characters using sPatch and Moray. Ghost is a CSG with bicubic patches, spheres and a prism (linear sweep) for the mouth, Pacman is CSG with spheres, boxes and prism for the mouth. I had first given PacMan arms and hands but after a few tests, I thought that it worked better with only 2 eyes and a mouth. The last sequence is done by using image maps and playing on the transmit property to make the video game screen appear progressively. The "real" characters and their "pixel" representation have exactly the same movement to make the transformation smooth. I used a lot Chris Colefax' clock macros for the animation, althought I had to create some movements on my own by using the clock directly (especially for the video game sequence, the texture of the "energy dot" and the ghost floating in the air). The whole animation is divided in 6 sequences. Each of them (except the last one) is described in its own set of files, all derived from a original set of POV and INC files containing the main elements. Sequence 1: Title + entering into the maze Sequence 2: Pursuit seen from the camera in the maze until the "energy dot" Sequence 3: PacMan reaches the "energy dot" and eats it Sequence 4: Zoom on the scared ghost Sequence 5: Pursuit of the ghost + video game sequence Sequence 6: Fade to the end title Sequence 2 and 3 are divided and rendered partially using the Subset_Start_Frame/Subset_End_Frame to allow the editing (2a/3a/2b/3b) when PacMan reaches the "super" dot. Eventually, I ran out of time to meet the dead line so the final fade to the end title (sequence 6) was made using the animation effects of Paint Shop Pro 5 (shame on me!) By the way, I did not have much time to clean up the POV files, so I don't include the listings. If you are interested, I will send it by email. THINGS I WOULD CHANGE IF I HAD THE TIME: - Change the positions and the intensity of the lights. The scene is not exactly lit the way I wanted it. - Find a nice way to include the dots that PacMan is supposed to be eating along its way to the "super" dot (the little dots in the real game) - Improve the video game sequence: points added to the score should appear at the place PacMan eats a ghost, the eyes of the ghosts should fly away when eaten. - Animate the ghosts' sheets to make them more frightening. - Generally speaking, make the whole thing smoother (but everything has to be put in 5 Mb!) MUCH LESS RELEVANT MATTERS: - This is my first entry in the IRTC and my first animation ever. I guess there are lots of things to improve ;-) I hope you'll like it because I had fun doing it. - The original character and game were named Puckman, from the Japanese phrase pakupaku, which means to flap one's mouth open and close. (see http://www.emuunlim.com/doteaters for more details on the history of PacMan)