TITLE: Agent X NAME: Nick Santos COUNTRY: New Hampshire, USA EMAIL: BoomerKuwanger@aol.com WEBPAGE: http://NickSantos.virtualave.net TOPIC: Alien Invasion COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. MPGFILE: agent_x.mpg ZIPFILE: agent_x.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray for Windows 3.1 TOOLS USED: pjBMP2AVI avi2mpg1 Paint (for jpeg conversion) Notepad (to write this) My calculator, pencil, and paper (The law of cosines -- ARGGGHHHH!!!) CREATION TIME: Errrr...probably longer than I can count. On average frames took about an hour a piece to render, although they ranged from 10 min. to 3 hrs per frame. HARDWARE USED: 2 Pentium 133 MHz with 32 megs of ram each (...I think) 1 AMD-K6 266 MHz with 48 megs of ram (when I was close to deadline) VIEWING RECOMENDATIONS: ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: A robotic secret agent (Agent X) infiltrates CIA headquarters through a vent. It lowers itself into a top secret computer room and downloads some data onto a disk. However, it finds that it will not get away as easily as it wishes... VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: What's that supposed to mean? Any mpeg-player should work. The video resolution is 320 X 240 at 25 fps. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: I discovered the world of ray-tracing while taking a video course, so I was inclined to incorporate a lot of video techniques in this animation. I probably should discuss this aspect as well. FROM A DIRECTOR'S POINT OF VIEW: One of the nice features of animation is that you have complete control over everything. I tried to create a very structured, organized setting by using colors (besides blacks, whites, and grays) sparsely. Each color is used for a specific reason. In addition, all motion was restricted to Agent X and the computer to give the building an empty feeling. In regards to motion, Agent X moves linearly to make it look awkward (this was especially interesting to watch this effect because spontaneous acceleration is virtually non-existant in the real world), while the camera always moves on quadratic curves for smoothness. It was also useful to be able to control reflections so easily. It was a little weird creating such a short piece (I'm used to creating 3-5 minute pieces). I'm also still working on the timing in animations, so I apologize if the rhythm is a bit disproportioned. FROM A TECHNICAL POINT OF WIEW: All of the code was written completely by hand. This is the first real animation that I have done, and I did a lot of experimentation. First I modelled each object, and then cut and pasted them into each shot. Rather than making it one huge animation, I compiled it shot by shot and then connected all of the shots in the avi and mpeg encoders. This made the code easier to work with, debug, and optimize. Not every object was in every shot, and it cut the render time significantly to remove objects not in the frame. I included all of the POV-Ray files, if anyone is interested in looking at them. All of the shots are labeled "00sXX.pov" where XX is the shot number. In case anyone was wondering, shot11 and shot10 were switched by accident, and were simply rearranged at the end. Shot7B was a slightly different style of shot07. Shot07 was scrapped for some reason that I can't remember (I think there may have been some error in the math that I didn't notice until after I rendered it). OTHER NOTES: This is my first major ray-tracing project, so there's just a few things that I'd like to say: -- Superellipsoids are extremely useful once you learn how to use them efficiently. -- You can never appreciate the value of trigonometry when trying to figure out how to place objects. -- Keep things simple -- Write notes in the text (//like this) as reminders -- Do not procrastinate!!! I needed more time than I thought in the end and almost didn't make it. -- I pity the fool! (I must pay my respects to Mr. T!) -- Until I found POV-Ray, I assumed that computer generated 3D graphics were only available to the elite. A million thanks to the creators of POV-Ray for making such a powerful tool available to the public. -- Thanks to my Video, Trig, and Physics teachers; their lessons made this possible. -- If you have read all the way down to here -- you have way too much free time on your hands.