EMAIL: jull43@tampabay.rr.com NAME: Matt Giwer TOPIC: Duel COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Shinkaga COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: http://www.giwersworld.org/artv/ & artii/ & artiii/ & artiv/ RENDERER USED: povray 3.6 TOOLS USED: gimp, mpeg_encode RENDER TIME: 47.875 hr estimate based on 3447 frames about 50 seconds each HARDWARE USED: Celeron 400, 64M, linux 2.4.18-3 kernel VIEWING: The usual highly recommended computer. FWIW, I did once post viewing advice here and was downgraded by those who did not follow it so this is a worthless section. IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Shinkaga. Usually spelled Shinkage in American English and seen in Shinkage-Ryu, use Google. The student here is clearly violating the discipline out of passion. A cliched blood fued. A duel over a woman. The bad guy holding her prisoner and the good guy coming to the rescue. Liberal theft from Kurasawa and Bruce Lee. Also stolem from the sequel to The Seven Samurai -- there really is one. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: From Life of Brian Jerusalem Person: You just can't please some people. Brian the ex-cripple: That's just what Jesus said. So I read high praise in the last round for the visual resolution quality of the animation. So this time I go for both length of the presentation and resolution. Doing both requires setting a theme and exposition that does not require much bandwidth to show a lot of frames with the mpeg1 codec. Minimum motion as a fraction of total pixels and simple scenes are needed to keep down the bandwidth. Looking at the size of the finished mpeg I could have gone back and included more motion and more complicated scenery but the calendar rules. 8-Ball got a woman but still no balls so to speak. A bit like Bugs Bunny in a dress. After I see how Team America plays out I'll think about an 8-Ball sex scene. The enduring Kurasawa scenes are those with minimal motion when action is expected. I only steal from the best. New Tricks: The tower took forever to render with actual texture mapped superellipsoids. So I created an image map of a flat "brickwork" of them and mapped it to a cylinder. When the movement is too hard, change the point of view just like George Lucas does. When robot stalks back and forth there was a choice of lots of work on the legs on the turn for maybe five to ten frames or a close up with the legs out of frame when he turns. Rule 38: If you are ever conceivably interested in animation, create every object with animation in mind. In my last one Dance I used the bot I created in my first robot animation years ago. GENERAL INFO: http://www.giwersworld.org/artiv/mpeg.phtml has generic comments on size limited animations. Pixelation and file size are tradeoffs. Higher quality means larger file. I trade off size and time. http://www.giwersworld.org/artv/ has several examples of animations as submitted and in optimum resolution. Generally it is 10M submitted and 25M optimum resolution.