EMAIL: thomas.bates@shaw.ca NAME: Thomas Bates TOPIC: Force COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Counterforce COUNTRY: Canada WEBPAGE: http://members.home.net/ejdeha/ RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5 beta 9 TOOLS USED: Microsoft Photo Editor 3.01 - for viewing frames IrfanView 3.61 - for viewing frames and batch-converting BMP to TGA CMPEG.EXE - for MPEG encoding CREATION TIME: Three months -- includes about an hour or two per day designing, and countless overnight renders. HARDWARE USED: Celeron, 400 MHz, 320 MB ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: The concept was inspired by the family at alt.fan.dragons It's your basic story of a Knight-In-Shining-Armour rescuing a Fair Maiden from ... no, wait ... I tried to make the story tell itself. (YOU tell ME the story.) CAST: Ejdeha-ma Sefeed-eh - the white leader Gelgisith - the small golden wyvern Pyros Rutilicus - the large red dragon. Deranged Dragon - the larger green dragon. Parvaneh - the object of our mission. Nameless extras as guards. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: I have been working on the character models for months and they continue to be a Work-In-Progress. I have not used any modelling or posing tools--these are done strictly in text. I abandoned AA during the last several seconds of the piece because I was running out of time (20 hours left, 200 images to go, 30 min/image -- something's gotta go). When I started this project, I looked at what others had done and found some entries that were over 60 seconds long. Using this, I wrote a 60-second script. About half-way through, I found that the MPEG encoder that I was using would only allow me about 30-seconds, so I modified my script accordingly. When I was close to the end, I found a better MPEG encoder that had better picture quality as well as better compression allowing for up to about 50 seconds. This let me breathe a little easier, but at this point it was too late to change the script to fill up the time available. That's ok, though, I think it's quite nice as it is. }:8} On the other hand ... There were SO many things I wanted to do with this if I had more time. Maybe next time. (I wanted to fade from one scene to the next ... I wanted the dragons to shoot "Force" bolts at the tower guards and have them tumbling off the tower ... I wanted the tower guards to be shooting arrows ... I wanted to have some "coincident object" detection so the dragon's various limbs didn't pass through the stone floor, walls and ceiling (and each other) ... I wanted to have the fetters turn red hot and fall clanging to the floor ... I wanted Parvaneh (the captive) to stay pinned to the wall just one more second until she was actually released from the fetters ,,, ) I certainly learned a lot from this, my first "feature-length" animation--things that will allow me to have more time, next time.