TITLE: MarbleSpeed

NAME: Edward A. Leibnitz
COUNTRY: USA

EMAIL: leibnitz@rcn.com
TOPIC: Speed
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: marblesp.mpg
ZIPFILE: marblesp.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.5


TOOLS USED: 
    Dave's Targa Animator, avi2mpg


CREATION TIME: 
    3 days, 22 hours, and 37 minutes for 1374 frames rendered with
anti-aliasing set off.


HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 4 2 GHz 512 M RAM


ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 


This animation is meant for a first viewing to be a mystery as to what the
camera's viewport 
is "speeding" down apon. Is it some type of celestial object? Apon closer
inspection it is a series 
of torii that are getiing knocked by a falling hammer and sent on their merry
way up a ramp system 
following the LAW OF CONSERVATION OF KINETIC AND POTENTIAL ENERGY! 

This is not a "faked" motion study .... it is a real excercise in programming
the laws of classical 
mechanics in POV_Ray. 

NOTE: The hammer and torus mass are made equal to make calculations somewhat
easier; notably that 
the resulting torus speed can be tweaked to be approximately 11.75 which looks
really nice for a demo!

This program was designed to be as modifiable as possible. It was designed to
pass values by variable 
reference not by inputted value in every opportunity available. If one chooses
to read the code you 
should notice it contains areas where user modifiable values are located. the
render will work with 
different values for hammer arm lengths as well as ramp length and incline
angle. Explore the 
program .... there are many user changable values. 

NOTE: make sure that 
sqrt((initial velocity)*(initial velocity) - 2 * Gravitational Constant* Elevation) 
is positive or else the torus will just stop!


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
    I used RealOne Player - freeware version. Any MPEG
player will probably work well.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


Open up MarbleSpeed.pov (and all the associated *.inc if you choose) in your
editor.

Set your POVRAY.INI file to include:

; this is the animation loop settings that I ran for 24 frames per second from
begining to a conceivable end.
; This is actually longer than the 1374 frame I actually rendered for the final
product based on user settings.
Initial_Frame = 1
Final_Frame = 1560
Initial_Clock = -20    
Final_Clock = 45
; end of animation loop settings 

Focus on the MarbleSpeed.pov file and click on the run icon .... that's all
there is.

NOTE: This is being rendered at 320 x 240 for the contest, but it was intented
to be rendered 
in 2.35 Aspect Ratio (i.e., Cinemascope) to preserve a sense of landscape. Extra
care was taken to 
ensure the quality of the individual frames. It will render beautifully at any
frame size. 

Anti-aliasing significantly improves the render of an individual frame but was
turned off for the production 
animation run because it was not noticiably improving the end-product mpg file
and was slowing down 
the final render. This feature is recommended for DVD quality animations,
provided time is 
not a limiting factor.

The render produced a warning of max_trace_level on "some" of the frames: but
they appeared as 
I wanted them to look so this value was not altered. I want the viewer to see a
stark lonely 
world of sharp contrasts, cold marble colors and only the laws of physics
acting. 

The animation was performed with a single animation loop using only POV-Ray. The
resulting *.tga files 
were converted into an *.avi file using Dave's Targa Animator and the
end-product mpg was created 
using avi2mpg.