TITLE: In the lab
NAME: Jerome Grimbert
COUNTRY: France
EMAIL: jerome.grimbert@atosorigin.com
WEBPAGE: http://grimbert.cjb.net/
TOPIC: Forces
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: inthelab.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray (official for Windows 3.5b6&b7&b8, patched 3.1g on Linux)

TOOLS USED: 
    ImageMagick, VideoMach, BB_Avi2Mpg

CREATION TIME: 
    No record, but my machine is too slow for comparaison.

HARDWARE USED: 
    180 MHz MMX Pentium

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 


Very first degre of interpretation of the topic,
so I hope it is not off-topic. It does not even tried to 
play with the limit of the topic. It's just some illustrations
of some forces, in some abstract laboratory tests. 
The 'heros' is a testing object which undergoes various transformations
due to the forces. (because I had no image for forces themselves).



VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
    WMPlayer of W98 SE works well, should loop fine.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


The main action were made with my personnal patched povray 3.1g++ on Linux.
The environnement was kept rather simple first to save on
render time, and also to hopefully get a good mpeg encoding.
(without any ugly block). Once rendered and tested, I did not had
enough time on my slow machine to enhance the environment with some fancy
idea that I had, such as a paving of superellipsoid to make realistic lab
environment, and I did not have any idea of environment. 
Afterall, Forces is rather an abstract topic, so a rather
poor/abstract environment should fit too.
There is also only one moving camera, because these lab's experiments do not 
really fit the classical 'describe the world and zoom on subject' approach.
(Well, if I had more time/quicker machine, adding a full introduction in the 
lab, with a complete lab setting, that might be an idea (it would make
that introduction off-topic, but it would make probably a good intro for the
remaining sequences); but that such a big If...)

Frame rate was 24 from the beginning, because it means fluid
motion without too much frames (as well as possibly by-passing
the trouble between PAL 25 and NTSC 29.97, moreover, it's a
progressive frame and 24 fps is for that kind of film).
The ending generic was made with pov 3.5 (still in beta!),
because the justification of text was a Must-be for it. 
The number of frame for the generic was adjusted so that the total number 
of frame was made a multiple of 24. (Hoping first to encode with a GOP
containing 1 I for 24 frames, but result was not that good, so turned back
to the classical 12 frames/Gop, just adjusting the maximum bitrate until
the animation fits).