TITLE: PinDrop The Universe on the head of a pin.
NAME: Mike Norton
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: manorton@jps.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.jps.net/manorton/3d
TOPIC: Microcosms
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: pindrop.mpg
ZIPFILE: pindrop.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Blender3D for Linux V1.53

TOOLS USED: 
    Rhino3D, mpeg_encode

CREATION TIME: 
    About one month

HARDWARE USED: 
    133 MHz Pentium with 32 meg Ram

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 


I searched the furthest reassess of my mind to come up with a subject for this
topic.  I even did a
search on www.dictionary.com to get some ideas. 

Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)  web1913  

       Microcosm \Mi"cro*cosm\, n.  F. microcosme, L. microcosmus, fr.
          Gr. mikro`s small + ko`smos the world. 
          A little world; a miniature universe. Hence (so called by
          Paracelsus), a man, as a supposed epitome of the exterior
          universe or great world. Opposed to macrocosm. --Shak.
                         
I went with the little world idea.  I remember an old saying about fitting the
universe on the head of a
pin.  So that is what I shot for.  

This is my first time entering the animation comp.  I have entered the still
many times but wanted to get
my feet wet trying a new media, animation.  It is also my first time using
Blender3D.  I had to learn as I
went, and all the guys on EFNet's #blender3d are due a ton of thanks for giving
me some tips and
help.  Especially Zr.  Thanks man!.

The idea is you fly into the molecular structure of the pin and find yourself
flying through the galaxy. 
You then plummet into earth and fly along the surface until you head down into
the depths of our
planet.  Once you reach the center of the earth it all starts over again.  But
don't put the animation on
loop, its really not set up to loop, just going for a concept of getting smaller
and smaller.  I hope you
like it.  I sure had fun putting it together.


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
    ActiveMovie for Windows 95/NT works best. If you have
a good
system in Linux you might get away with mpeg_play but the frame rate needs to be
30 FPS.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


First things First.  If you have not tried Blender3d I would suggest that you
install Linux and give this
incredibly detailed and feature packed free animation tool a go.  I really cant
believe all the things you
can do with it.  Http://www/blender.nl

Ok, I got the concept for the animation and story boarded it.  I figured out
that I needed 4 scenes with
varying camera positions in the first scene.  

I then modeled the pin for scene one with Rhino.  I could have used Blender but
I am still not up to
speed on modeling with it yet.  I still need to purchase the manual, of which I
plan to do shortly.

I imported the pin into blender and set up scene one in 4 different positions. 
It is actually 4 different
scenes in one but whos counting.  I set the pin on a constant rotation and make
it come past the
camera.  Once this is done I take each section and use the built in sequence
editor to piece them
together with some nice cross fades to black between each shot to give some
spacing.

The pin then comes and bounces on the floor.  Blender is not a ray tracer so
getting reflections is not
possible.  So to cheat this I found a cheat.  I copied the object and its motion
path and mirrored it
below the plane.  The plane has the alpha set to allow it to be transparent. 
The affect looks very
realistic for the short time it is happening.  But if you look closely you can
see that the lighting on the
mirrored version is incorrect for the scene, but it works for now.

The space fly through was started about 2 dozen times.  I could not figure out
how to get it to work the
way I wanted it to.  I actually tried scaling everything to actual solar system
scale but did not have
enough space in blender.  So I cheated a little bit.  

I first used a large cylinder with a star map applied to it for the back ground
but when you got close to
a planet it made some of the stars stretch along the x axis and it did not look
good.  Blender has a built
in star generator that I tried to stay away from at first because I did not have
it set right and it is a
resource hog when looking through the camera view.  But I got things set right
and really like the
outcome.  For one thing the stars are in actual 3d space.  When you fly through
space the stars move
past you.

The sun is a built in lens flair affect.  Each planet uses image maps applied to
spheres.  The earth has
a map for the surface, a map for the clouds and a halo for the blue glow that
the atmosphere gives off.

I had a lot of fun working on the Earth Fly through scene.  The materials all
came together as if by
magic.  The water, the clouds, the mountains, all really came together.  The
water is a large plane. 
There are 3 planes for the clouds one on top of the other.  They have a cloud
texture applied to them
with transparency set so you can gradually see though it.  I had more clouds but
found I only needed
three plans to get the desired affect.

There is one problem with this section that I was unable to get a work around
for yet.  When the
camera comes down through the plans of clouds it does real well until the camera
breaks through the
previous plane.  Then a flash to the next plane texture gives a kind of strobe
appearance.  I am going
to see if I can come up with a work around to make the decent more smooth later
on.

The mountains are a DEM file of the Monterey California cost line.  I converted
the DEM to a TGA and
applied the noise feature to a subdivided plane.  This is one of the sweetest
ways I have seen to make
height fields.  You have tons of control.  I added a mist so you came into the
mountains as if to run
onto a shore line.

The earth decent scene also took some doing.  I wanted a real wild ride.  I
tried my hand at modeling a
tube in blender but still lack good blender modeling know how.  So back to
Rhino.  I created a meta
curve and then railed a shape to make the tube.  Then the fun began.  I imported
it into blender and
placed the camera at the top and entered a key.  Then I moved to the end and
went to the frame
number I wanted to end on and entered a key.  Then in the middle, arranged the
camera and basically
continued through each frame to make sure the camera stayed on track.

The couple of jerky places in this sequence are due to some very sharp corners. 
So don't get sick to
your stomach.

I arranged all the scenes in the blender scene editor and applied crossfades and
transitions where
need be.  Then rendered the images and encoded them using mpeg_encode.

This was a very fun project and I learned a lot about the whole process.  I hope
to enter the next round
also.

Happy Rendering

