EMAIL: tlaville@club-internet.fr NAME: Thierry Laville TOPIC: Construction COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Playing Cards COUNTRY: France WEBPAGE: http://perso.club-internet.fr/tlaville RENDERER USED: 3DStudioMaxR2 TOOLS USED: AVI2MPG1 CREATION TIME: about 2 months HARDWARE USED: 800 MHz Pentium III 256 Mb VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: microsoft media player ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: As the most fragile constructions are often the most beautiful and hard to build, i choose to show the contruction of House of cards. (in France we say : Castle of Cards (Chateau de cartes), i don't know the english term ...) But the best way (up to me) was to give a proper life to the cards and let them build their own construction. So it gives the animation a cartoon touch, which is renforced with an appropriate circus music and sounds effects. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: I didn't use any special or complicated technics there. The major (and longest) work was spent on cards animations, in order to obtain the most natural movements possible. To make the movements of the cards, i used a free box deformation around the mesh of the cards and manual key editing. The mpeg compression make a great loss of quality in picture and sound.