TITLE: An Alien Invasion NAME: Uwe Post COUNTRY: Germany EMAIL: uwe.post@online.de WEBPAGE: http://www.upCenter.de TOPIC: Alien Invasion COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. MPGFILE: alienupc.mpg ZIPFILE: alienupc.zip RENDERER USED: MegaPOV 0.4 TOOLS USED: Paper and Pen, PaintShopPro, MainActor Sequencer, LensEffects, LSX Encoder CREATION TIME: about 5 hours HARDWARE USED: AMD K6-III-400, 192 MB RAM ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: This is my statement against racism. VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: First there was the idea. Aliens need not come from another planet. They can just come from another country... The movie consists of 7 takes, that is: 7 POVRay-files. It's impossible (at least for me) to animate real looking people. So I had to use abstract figures. To emphasize that they are something like puppets, I put them onto a theatre stage. So I started with the opening of the curtains (take A). The background of the stage is taken from a former (never finished) animation project of mine. It's a wallpaper and the shadows fall onto it. The puppets entering the stage are somewhat simple clock calculations with a little sinus in y-direction. (take B-D) The most complicated take is take E. The camera moves into the face of puppet 1, starting smooth, then looking into the opposite direction, showing the puppets from behind. There we see another face and some lens effects (simulating that the camera is looking strait into the spotlights). The hitting with the club is a somewhat complicated movement made with csg, rotate, if/else and so forth. When the camera moved back to the initial position, showing "reality" once again, take E is done. In take F the colored puppet speaks the word "welcome". This is a POVRay macro with simple text objects fading out with rgbt <...,clock> or so. Then the face color of puppet 1 changes, they are moving again towards each other and the curtain falls. At last, take G shows "thank you" (for your patience) and my email address. All ~800 frames where imported into MainActor (a quite inexpensive German video editing software from www.mainconcept.de) and exported as avi. I ran into problems when I tried to export as mpg, so I had to use the LSX encoder which we have in the office to create the mpg. You see, it's not so complicated. It took some time to create the video, but it was fun. And I always try to produce a unique story with some content, not a technically demanding task, because I have to work, a girlfriend I love and some other projects - which you can see on my website upCenter.de.