TITLE: Jar-O-Matic 2000
NAME: Matthew Tunnell
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: matt@teleport.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.teleport.com/~matt (not pov related)
TOPIC: Gadgets and Odd Devices
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: mtgadget.mpg
ZIPFILE: mtgadget.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.1e

TOOLS USED: 
    VB, Cmpeg, Notepad, DTA

CREATION TIME: 
    About 45 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    6(PII 266/64Mb) & 2(PII 350/64Mb) It's nice to work in IT.

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 

This animation shows a peanut butter jar with a stuck lid that presents 
little challenge to the Jar-O-Matic 2000.  All that is required is a few 
turns on the cranks and the lid slides off easily.


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
    Activemovie for Windows 95/NT works fine.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 

I wrote a sort of VB-Pov language binding which basically just prints 
POV commands to a file.  I absolutely had to have persistent variables 
(hint, hint), and wanted more programming flexibility and speed. 
Originally, each frame was a separate file, but the queue would only 
hold 128 frames.  Because of this limitation, I set the start and end 
clock the same as the start and end frame, and used a switch statement 
in the POV file with a case for every frame number.
All objects are standard CSG.  No modellers were used.  The screws were 
done with routines in VB to generate smooth triangles.  One full revolution 
is made in the INC file, then this is meshed and instanced as necessary.
All camera and object movements are done with internal B-Splines.
I used DTA a lot for quick looks at test renders.

