TITLE: Waiting for Copernicus, with apologies to Samuel Beckett
NAME: Stephen McAvoy
COUNTRY: UK
EMAIL: mcavoys@aol.com
WEBPAGE: None
TOPIC: Dancing
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: wfc.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    PovRay 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    Poser 4, 3dWin, PoseRay, TMPGEnc, Moray, Moray Plugins and
Excel.

CREATION TIME: 
    33.5 hours rendering; 120 frames, 640 X 480

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD 1.7 GHz, 512 Mb

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 
    Before Copernicus published his conclusion that
the Sun was the centre of the universe, everyone knew that the Earth was the
centre of the universe and that the universe was a closed space surrounded by a
spherical envelope beyond which there was nothing.
This is a view from those times.
It is a simple cyclic animation with no storyboard but a little bit of
symbolism. The viewpoint is set in the Primum Mobile with, as you would expect
the Earth at the origin. We can see the spirits or angels wending their way to
and from the earth. Thus fulfilling the dance motif. Only the spheres of the
Moon, Mercury, Venus and the Sun are seen to move. The spheres of Mars,
Jupiter, Saturn and the Fixed Stars, the Frontier to the Beyond, look
stationary.
        As for apologies to Samuel Beckett, that I'll leave up to you to decide
:-}


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
    Full Screen if possible at 7.5 fps

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 
    I have been playing with
some BHV motion files I found on the web at Stanford University, for some time.
When I saw that the animation topic was "dancing". A gift from heaven or the
Empyrean, I thought. I quickly created a "flat Earth" and the Solar system, in
Moray 3.5. That took a couple of weeks. I modified two ballet BHV files in
Poser 4 so that they were almost cyclic and converted the resulting OBJ files
to Moray UDO's using both 3DWin and PoseRay. I spent a month or so fine tuning
the animation and the P.O.V. in Pov-Ray 3.5.