EMAIL: matthias@giwersworld.org NAME: Matthias M. Giwer TOPIC: Construction COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Stick It! COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: Matt Giwer's World RENDERER USED: Povray 3.1g TOOLS USED: mpeg_encode, Gimp for starfield CREATION TIME: About 48 hours HARDWARE USED: PII/333 Linux 2.2 VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: A computer is desirable but not manadtory. ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: This started as just as a simple version of what I have in mind for this competition. It worked rather easily in the first attempt so I made it a bit more complete in case I don't find the time to do the one I want to do. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: I could go into a long digression on creating time variant splines with arbitrary starting points and paths with fixed end points. It would make for long and dull reading and require much creative BS. Or I could simply suggest using rand() to set the rate of rotation and translation and renumbering the frames in reverse order before creating the MPEG. I think Edison was the first splice a shot in backwards. The rest is trivial so far as povray goes but the circular text is included anyway. I know the expanding ring is dumb but people expect Lucasisms. The promo poster has a better starfield? Isn't the promo always better than the movie? The real reason is the starfield quality had to be cut to fit the 5 Meg size limit. The Linux utility ppmtojpeg was used to convert from the ppm output to jpg with the following switches. ppmtojpeg --optimize --quality=75 --smooth=50 --dct=float The starfield was created with Gimp but Photoshop will do. Create a plasma, select a range from a magnitude histogram and apply colored noise to the resulting image. This gives a vague pattern from the range selection of the plasma yet retains a random appearance. If you know either Gimp or PS, that explains how. If you don't, a longer explanation won't help. The image of Jupiter was stolen from the NASA Hubble Space Telescope website. Always steal the largest size available. As to the jpeg conversion that can reduce the size of the resultant MPEG by 60% and more depending upon the scene. In some cases it does little. The smooth parameter more or less governs.