TITLE: Anthrosphinx Alien Speed Freak
NAME: Markus Altendorff
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: maal-irtc20030115@anthrosphinx.de
WEBPAGE: http://www.markus-altendorff.de/
TOPIC: Speed
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: maal_asf.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Cinema 4D R8

TOOLS USED: 
    Cinema 4D, Cinema 4D NET, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere,
Lemkesoft
GraphicConverter, Apple Quicktime, M.Pack 2

CREATION TIME: 
    approx. 200 hours total, 150 during last two weeks

HARDWARE USED: 
    Apple G4 800 Dual for all things, AMD Athlon 2400 as render
slave


ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 
    "The logkeeper for Planet Earth and her assistant get an
urgent call to return to their home base. But how much fun is fast movement in
empty space? And how do you get even with someone that broke your hour-long
non-resume download?"
This movie uses "speed" in various ways: slow and fast movements,
"bullet-time"-like scenes and camera moves, and of course just a plain old
speeding spaceship. Guess my characters are still (quote from an earlier
comment
on a 2001 animation) "borderline cliche"... ;-)


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
    Any MPEG player should do (tested with Windows Media
Player, ATI Player, Quicktime Mac 9/X), except VideoLANclient on MacOS X which
stutters on the audio. Play it at double size, or fullscreen and step back a
bit. Make sure to set up the brightness right, i've found that most monitors
(esp. TFTs) are set to loose much detail in the dark areas (euphemised as
"having high contrast"). If you're able to play any of the
"first-person-view-fighting-games" on your monitor without loosing too bad,
you're probably all set. If it's all just a dark mess, turn up the brightness.
AND PLAY THE MUSIC LOUD! ;-)


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


Alterations to the raw renderings:
Lensflares and highlights are post-process FX built into the Cinema4D render
engine. The rendered sequences have been cut and edited in Adobe Premiere for
fade-overs between scenes and adding of subtitles. All images are
"contrast-softened" (adding a layer of 128/128/128 grey at 13 percent opacity
on
top of the tracks sequence) in Premiere, to increase the MPEG quality (results
in less HF color noise and more detail since MPEGging with M.Pack 2 increases
the contrast again, otherwise cutting off dark and bright areas). No further
enhancements or compositings werde made. By the way, Adobe Premiere was a real
pain with constant crashes during subtitling.

Overview:
I started out with a set of sketches on paper right after the announcement of
the topic, and then got all covered in "real life" issues instead... until late
december. I then took a three week break from work and started building the
models, and took one and a half week to animate all scenes. It's still only
sort
of a "first draft" and could be improved by adding all kinds of eye candy (the
rooms in the spaceship are quite empty, but then again, maybe these two
creatures have a must-clean-up gene which i lack ;-).
Music was added for fun, using the SmartSound automated soundtrack generator
that come with Adobe Premiere. No time for a proper sound effects track, sorry.

Technical:
The Models:
A few of the models came from my own archive: The cat-creature is a ongoing
"work-in-progress" which got enhanced for this round (remodeled chest, hands,
claws, teeth, deformation bones setup and more), same goes for the winged
creature (new wings, bones restructured, point weighting added to mesh).
The two terminals along the wall of the observation room are archived parts
from
earlier animations, as is the terminal with the status messages.
The rest was created for this animation, i.e. the earth model (image maps by
NASA), the big spaceship, the small spaceship, the observation room, the earth
hologram, the hangar deck etc.
On a sidenote, the two chairs in the small spacecraft have alterations for
their
inhabitant's anatomy, with free areas to accomodate the pair of wings and the
tail :-) 
The earth uses three spheres inside of each other: Smallest is a textured image
of the earth, flat color, with the corresponding bump map. Medium layer is a
sphere with the cloud layer, set to white color, with the cloud image as bump
and as alpha map. The biggest sphere has a fresnel shader, which builds up
opaque shining blue color towards the edge to create the "atmosphere" look.
All these images come from the NASA Blue Marble Project
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/ 
"These images are freely available to educators, scientists, museums, and the
public. NASA images are generally not copyrighted." (NASA Website).

The animation:
Starting out with a rough draft of the scene, i use a stopwatch to write a
timed
script of what happens and what the characters are saying - that determines the
time that i need for the subtitles. Whenever i don't do this, i have to alter
the speed of the animation afterwards :-)
I use the stage object of Cinema4D a lot, which allows to switch the camera
during the animation. Most of the time, i've got 6-8 cameras in a scene and
move
from camera to camera instead of creating separate scenes for each viewing
angle.
I've found that the smoothest camera movement results from using cameras
together with "look-at" camera targets, and animating only their positions in
space instead of setting the camera angles manually. Don't put the targets
inside an animated bone structure, though (i've ruined a shot in this animation
by this).
The rest of the animation is done by setting up the usual keyframes for the
bones, and tweaking the in-between speed curves.

Special scenes:
The real-world flights are in fact rendered, using a very simple setup. I'm
doing panoramic photography (http://www.panoramas.de/ , just some shameless
self-promotion) :-) and so i've built scenes with two spheres, a small one and
a
big one. The camera is at the center and tilts and pans, while the ship flies
between the two spheres. Each sphere is identically textured, does not cast or
receive any shadows and shines with the color of the texture. The texture of
the
inner sphere uses the alpha channel i've painted on the panoramas, so that
clouds, terrain and buildings in the image can cover the ship when it flies
behind them. By the way, the locations are at our local castle and steel mill
(now closed down): the chimneys above the blast furnaces, and on top and on the
way to the moutain made out of the cinder that's been building up for 149
years.

My personal comments:
The whole thing was anywhere between dream and nightmare. This was the first
project i've tried with Cinema 8, and they've changed about everything in the
program since version 7. In hindsight, i'd say for the better, mind you, but
they've CHANGED it. All the buttons and controls and the logic were in
different
places, my bone setup fell apart and the whole thing turned into one BIG MESS
with two weeks remaining. Then came the christmas holidays and New Year and i
got nothing done (except for sitting around with friends :-) But then slowly
things started to fall in place (almost, there's so much where this animation
needs improvement), and here it is. 

Things i've learned:
- 10.401.316 bytes give you 3 Minutes 45 seconds = 5625 frames of 25 fps movie
time @ 45 kBytes MPEG stream, 32 kBit mono audio, and take up 99.2 percent of
the allowable file size. Enough time to tell at least some story.
- My timing is always too slow when animating. I end up throwing out half of
the
frames to speed things up. Maybe i'll try a video camera for timing next time.
- If you've got an editor that supports OpenGL, TURN IT ON. After two weeks of
slow "p.i.t.a." ;-) editing, and at the end of this project, i've found that
turning OpenGL on meant the difference between pain & heaven... (<- obscure
music reference ;-)
- Inverse Kinematics can be very temperamental. Don't trust them. Always check.
- Always do a preview render of any animation. If you don't, the final render
sure will suck because you've forgotten something.
- DON'T use 16 light sources nearby, and another one that's 1 Million units
away. Just don't do it, OK? (slowed rendering to a real craw at 240x176
pixels!)
- DON'T rely on a simple "target expression" if you're animating a creature
with
eyes where you can see the orientation of the iris. i've used a Cinema XPresso
chain with a "orient to the target, and then overwrite the Z axis of the
rotation with pi/2, you stupid machine" logic :-)
- DON'T freeze all bones in their place in frame 0 of an animation. You just
end
up either a) deleting all these keys manually later, or b) you get an 361234
degrees spin between the "zero key" and the first key of your animation (at
least me, and at least with Cinema 8). Record the keys when you need it, and
not
a moment earlier. AND take the time to manually set up the motion curves RIGHT
THEN.
- DON'T hesitate to throw away anything you've already rendered if you don't
like it. It's your animation, and you're the one who has to be happy with it.
- DON'T use displacement mapping in Cinema. Just don't. Believe me. After
scaling down my "Wyngz" model to fit into the Spaceship, she had the HUGEST
eyebrows ever (the displacement textures are applied at WORLD coordinates, not
local ones...)
- DON'T forget to have fun. Really :-)