EMAIL: maarten_hofman@hotmail.com NAME: Maarten Hofman TOPIC: Journey COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Electricity COUNTRY: USA (Originally the Netherlands) WEBPAGE: http://people.zeelandnet.nl/whhofman/jen CREATION TIME: Several months of work, actual rendering/compressing 11 hours RENDERER USED: Povray 3.5 HARDWARE USED: Pentium IV 1.8 GHz TOOLS USED: * Adobe Photoshop 6.0 (create the title image, height fields, editing television picture) * WinZip (to create the zip file) * CMPEG (to create the MPEG file, with a home made IPB.CTL file) * PaperPort (to scan the picture for the television) ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: It is probably best to first view the animation, and then refer to this text for any details. The animation tries to show the journey of electricity. It starts at a dam of a hydro plant which opens and causes water to flow. The water turns a turbine, and this causes the light of the building to turn on. After the lights turn on the door opens to let the camera in, which moves to see the turbine turning. Then a little flash indicates the electricity that goes into the power net, and the camera follows it through the window, where it moves into a substation to be transformed to a higher voltage (to reduce losses while transporting it over long distances). It then moves towards the power pylon, and from power pylon to power pylon (and the camera moves with it) passing a maintainance road. There are red and white balls attached to the wires, to warn low flying planes that they are there (the free standing power pylons are also painted red and white to make them more visible). After a while it reaches another substation, where the voltage is lowered again (for part of the wires, half of the generated electricity goes to the east, using a different kind of pylons). From this substation wooden poles bring the electricity over a mountain to a valley (where there is a T-branch in some of the rough roads, with a sign post). Once it reaches the house it is again transformed to a lower voltage, and then the flash moves to the house (though the wires continue to the west with more wooden poles). Next to the house is a Suzuki Vitara (a vehicle like that is needed for roads like this). Behind the house is a small piece of tarmac, but this quickly changes into rougher roads anyway. The flash moves into the meter, and then the light turns on in the house. The camera moves with the flash into the house, and the breaker box opens. The camera then follows the flash to the television, where the red stand-by LED turns on. Then the television turns on, and shows another journey: that of a cycling cat. Note that most of the landscape is based on the landscape of the sultanate of Oman, except for the hydro plant, which would not really work in a country where it rains only very rarely (and all dams are just there to protect the land from these torrents of rain). The hydro plant is based on one in Poland. The trace includes three different power pylons and two different types of substations. Not everything programmed is visible in the raytrace, if desired, you can download the source files and explore other areas of the map (some recommended view points are available in the comments). The house and its surroundings are based on a USA house (ranch style). DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: I like programming all the objects myself in the POVRAY scene language, which I did again here. I managed to keep everything in one set of source files, i.e. one run generates the entire sequence. Here is a list of the things I encountered and how I solved them: * For my stills I developed a very nice way to do water (after I followed Christoph's excellent internet course about it) but unfortunately this type of water takes hours per image, so I had to cut some corners to make it fast enough for the animation to complete within reasonable time. I managed to create a simpler, but still reasonably realistic version of water, which you see in the animation. * I needed quite some math to get all the beams aligned in the power pylons (they are all based on pylons I saw in real life). * Originally I wanted to have the flash only be visible occasionally, but after some experimentation I discovered that this would only work if I added a sound with it, to focus attention towards it. As sound is currently not used in judging animations, I decided to keep it visible at all times. * Because some of the mountains have interesting ridges, some of the camera movements are non-linear (i.e. quadratic). * Putting the roads in was tricky, but I eventually just took my heightfield and made everything that was not road black, and raised it slightly above the other heightfield in a different colour. This created a nice dusty road effect. * The bear is the only object in the trace that I made earlier, and was my first attempt at using blobs. * This is the first animation where I quickly run out of memory. I had to tweak the IPB.CTL file of CMPEG in order to fit the animation in the required 10MB. Currently quality setting is I:4, P:5 and B:12. I learned a lot about MPEG I compression this way. For some reason I prefer sharp shadows, despite them being less realistic. I guess it is just the way I raytrace.