TITLE: Revenge of the Dragon Lord
NAME: Martin Magnusson
COUNTRY: Sweden
EMAIL: Martin.Magnusson.7121@student.uu.se
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9946/

TOPIC: Toys
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: rdl.mpg
ZIPFILE: rdl.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3

TOOLS USED: 
    CMPEG for MPEG compression, Moray for making some of the
objects, PhotoShop for making image maps, bump map, height field and 
title image, Color Picker for the colours of the hands.
RENDER TIME: 200 computer hours for the final frames is a sensible 
estimation

HARDWARE USED: 
    A number of Sun Sparc Ultra 1 and an Intel P133

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 

Someone is playing with a small boy's toys.
The story, in case it's unclear: A police car is on patrol. A
careless speeding trike driver crashes into the police car and vaults
onto the desk. The bold policeman walks to the crashed trike. A dragon
is lurking behind the pencil holder scares the policeman to death. 


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
    25 fps, 24 bpp, fairly low screen resolution,
like all animations I guess.
NUMBER OF FRAMES: 764


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 

I read somewhere that a proffesional 3d-artist said that it's almost
impossible to create a good-looking scene if the edges can't catch a
highlight. I believed him, so I used superellipsoids extensively, there 
are hardly any boxes or cylinders involved.
I knew from the start that I wanted the animation to take place indoors
with sunlight shining in from the outside. Then I started to think about
what objects to put there.

Walls, desk, window: 
Pretty straight-forward primitives and CSG. They are all modeled the way
my childhood-room looked like. The wallpaper is a turbulent bozo pattern 
that doesn't repeat the way real wallpaper do, but I didn't think that
was a problem. It suffered badly from the MPEG compression, though. The 
edges between the lengths of wallpaper are just a gradient normal 
pattern.

Hands:
They were perhaps the hardest objects to model. I tried a few different 
ways of making them with bezier patches and image maps before I tried 
blobs, which turned out to be much easier. I threw away my image maps 
and used a POV-Ray texture which also looked better. The almost unvisible
crackle normal increased the render time quite a lot. My model wasn't as
posable as I thought at first, so the hand - or at least the thumbnails -
actually changes a few times during the animation, depending on the 
position and camera angle.

Policeman and dragon:
Blobs. I haven't really 'discovered' blobs before, but I certainly did
while making this animation. Blobs are great!

Trike, policecar, desk lamp:
Made mostly with Moray for Windows. Lots of superellipsoids...

Table cloth:
Height field with a bump map and an image map.

Ruler:
CSG with an image map.

The sky outside is reused from my entry for the Metamorphosis round.

At first I used an area light for the sun, but just a couple of days before
I started the final rendering I realized that it would take too much time,
so unfortunately I had to make it a point light in stead.
I used three lights for the in-door lighting: one pretty bright for the 
main light and two very dull for ambient lighting. The sun is a very bright
blue light.


When it came to making it all move, the collisions of the trike was by far
the most difficult part. At first I tried to make some sort of general 
easily changeable method with lots of parameters and stuff, but that just 
made it a lot more messy and difficult to work with. I ended up using the 
trial-and-error method, and it took lots of test renderings to make it look 
OK. I tried to avoid jerky camera movements as much as possible, so there's
a lot of sin going on in the camera statements.


Thanks go to Jaime Vives Piqueres for being a source of inspiration and
Lorenzo Quintana Juez for showing what's possible to do with blobs.


The ctl and in files used by cmpeg are also included in the zip file.

