EMAIL: kerry.j@optusnet.com.au NAME: Kerry Johnson TOPIC: Escape COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Marching Soldiers COUNTRY: Australia RENDERER USED: Custom raytracer developed by me TOOLS USED: AVI2MPG1 CREATION TIME: 3 months! HARDWARE USED: Althon XP 1500+ and Althon XP 1800+, both with 256Mb RAM VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: I use Media player - may look better with brightness turned up on CRTs ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: Just some soldiers marching along and "escaping" into a door into another world. I fully admit that its short, the story line is a bit light on and its relevance to the topic is not that strong, but as I talk about in the next section, I was more interested in writing the software. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: I wanted to write some software to learn more about raytracing and 3D graphics, and investigate some effects not included in "standard" software (ie free stuff like Povray). Good points about it: - General objects and effects - boxes, spheres, torii, cylinders, cones, planes, true-type fonts, unions, merges, differences, intersections, standard ambient-diffuse-specular shading model - A cell outline algorithm to draw solid outlines similar to those you see in traditional cell animation. You can see this effect on the soldiers and the clown and the text. The cool thing about this effect as opposed to the methods used to do this in polygon-based rendering is that is is implemented as part of the object geometry rather than as a post-processing technique. This means that it still works when viewed in reflections and refractions (such as through the snow-dome). - Posterised textures - see the clown - Billboarded pigments - see the soldiers - I really learnt a lot, both about research techniques, 3D graphics, parser implemntation, compiler implementation, math, blah blah. Bad points: - I spent to much time writing the software and not enought making the movie - Its written in Java, so its not the quickest bit of software around think I will get into a bit more real-time OpenGL graphics after this.