TITLE: Irresistible Force vs. Immovable Object
NAME: Zachary Brewster-Geisz
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: zach@brewstergeisz.cjb.net
WEBPAGE: www.hash.com/users/zachbg/
TOPIC: Force
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: force_zg.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Animation Master v8.5L

TOOLS USED: 
    A M v.9 for creating a font model via Howard Trickey's FontWiz,
Anzovin Studio's Setup Machine for rigging of the main character, Photoshop for
textures, QuickTime 5 Pro for compositing and compilation, Movie2MPEG for
encoding.

CREATION TIME: 
    A month and a half from conception to final render.

HARDWARE USED: 
    iMac DV Special Edition, 640MB, 400Mhz PowerPC G3.

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 
    "In the left corner..."


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
    Beer and remote in hand.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 

Short version: I thought it up, storyboarded it, designed it, modeled it,
animated it, and rendered it.
Long version:
I thought it up in bed, as I usually think of things, and woke up the next day
with a rough storyboard already in my head, plus a very complete picture of
Immovable Object (IO).  Irresistible Force (IF)'s design took a little longer
to figure out, but once I wrote down the storyboard he started to take shape.

My previous entry to the IRTC (Or All the Seas with Oysters, honorable mention
from two sessions ago) seems less complex than this one, but actually this was
a walk in the park comparatively.  First of all, this one's shorter.  Second of
all, IF just moves things around via gestures, as opposed to Ferd in Oysters,
who was always picking things up, holding onto things, etc. which is really
difficult to animate, especially on a time crunch.  Third of all, I used a new
skeletal rig for IF that was developed by Anzovin Studios, which was much
easier to animate with than the one I used for Oysters.

I used a lot of cheats to keep creation time down.  IF's walk cycle, for
instance: you never see his feet, so I never bothered to keep them from
slipping.  The crowd is another example--it's not a crowd, just a series of
planes with an animated decal applied to them (this works best for far-away
shots).

I discovered the joys of non-linear animation, too.  Take the end, where IF's
jumping all over the place and punching.  All I did was animate him rocking in
place, then jumping from one foot to the other, then I cycled this action back
and forth in sync with his movements on the ring.  Then I created a separate
action of a few punches and cycled THAT so he made punches at appropriate
times.  With this layering, it doesn't look like a simple cycle, yet it's a
huge time-saver when compared to hand-keying everything.

I did the same at the beginning.  His walk is a cycle, obviously, but so is his
fist movement--that's just one action run back and forth, blended atop the
walk.  (In fact I didn't even animate the lift of the fists--that's the
computer doing a blend.)  The bulk of the middle, from IF's jump to the start
of the fight, is all hand-keyed, as it were.  

IF's cape is animated with A:M's cloth simulation tools, and took a long time to
both simulate and get the settings correct.  Maybe I shoulda just done it by
hand.  IO, a much simpler character, naturally was much simpler to animate,
though getting the weight right for his walk was tricky.  He may still move too
fast in this version, but I was worried about taking too much time, given the
file size limits.  My original design called for him to have a mouth, but I
never got around to adding one.  Thank goodness.

For those who are interested in rendering and compositing esoterica, here's a
breakdown of times and methods.

Sequence 1 (the marquee):
Rendered all in A:M with no compositing; oversample 200% (rendered at twice the
size then scaled down), anti-aliased, shadows on.  Took a night and half a day
to render.  (Yow!)
Sequence 2 (the walk, the jump):
Again, rendered all in A:M, no compositing, because it seemed too complex to
deal with.  2000versample and one shadow-casting light.  Rendered in five to
eight hours, I think.
Sequence 3 (close-ups on the ring):
Three layers.  Top layer was characters alone, 2000.S., no shadows.  Took
maybe 8 hours (overnight).  Middle layer was the boxing ring (and IO's feet)
because I wanted shadows there to give it some definition.  Course, it's just
still images, so I thought, "hey, let's go all out!"  2000versample and
multi-ray shadows.  This sent the render time up to TEN hours--for three
frames.  Argh!  The background of the stands and the spectators was done
bare-bones--no O.S., no shadows--and took about 4-5 hours for three different
angles.  I slapped a blur filter on those to fake some depth-of-field.
Sequence 4 (the Fight!):
The top layer is the characters and the boxing ring, and was done at 2000.S.,
no shadows (I tried 'em at first, but I got an estimated render time somewhere
in the weeks to months range).  It took about 8 hours.  I wanted to do the same
for the background, but time constraints forced me to kick the oversampling and
it took about 3 hours.

I composited the layers and stitched together the sequences in QuickTime,
exported it to a movie, and as we speak Movie2MPEG is encoding it, hopefully
without too much quality loss.

Last minute credits.  The rig for IF is, as I said, created by Anzovin Studios
(www.anzovin.com), and was placed there by their software Setup Machine, a
lifesaver.  Most of the audience members were from a series of free models
designed by Eggington Productions (www.eggington.net); two were by me, and if
you look hard enough you'll see the main character from my last IRTC entry. 
Thanks to the folks at the animaster-l mailing list (especially Timothy Weber)
for their comments on an early version.  Thanks to my wife for dragging me away
from the computer long enough to enjoy my birthday.  And of course, thanks to
the IRTC for this kick-ass competition.

Zach Brewster-Geisz
Greenbelt, Maryland, USA