TITLE: medusas
NAME: Johannes Ewers
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: Johannes.Ewers@t-online.de
WEBPAGE: not yet
TOPIC: Creatures
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: medusa.mpg
ZIPFILE: medusa.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    povray 3.1

TOOLS USED: 

Moray 3.1 for all basic modelling,
trial version of Microsoft J++ 1.0 Java development tool (came with a JAVA book)
for animation control programm
trial version of MainActor 1.5 for converting images into AVI-clips (came with
my graphics board)
trial version of VideoWave II for cutting and blending of several clips
trial version of Xing Mpeg Encoder for coding of final movie (seems to produces
better output than VideoWave)
Photshop 4 for creation of "movie poster"

CREATION TIME: 
    about 20 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Celeron 433, 128 MB

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 

Medusas (or jellyfish) are fascinating creatures of the sea. The animation shows
a small submarine that encounters a school of medusas. 

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 

Some month ago I saw a movie about underwater life with nice pictures of divers
swimming through a school of jellyfish. That gave me the idea for this project.
The first step was to find a good way to animate the school of medusas. They
should move around as a group but avoid the submarine. Searching the web I
found an interesting solution in the work of Craig Reynolds
(http://hmt.com/cwr/boids.html). Reynolds had written a program that simulated
the behavior of schools of fishes and flocks of birds for SIGGRAPH '87. He
called his simulated animals "boids" (bird androids). He desribed the basic
principles of the program in his conference paper. Based on this paper I wrote
a small JAVA program that handles the interaction of medusas and submarine. It
creates position information as a sequence of POV-INC files for all medusas and
for the submarine. Sea-scenery, medusas and submarine were modeled with Moray
3.1. The exported POV-files were modified and assembled by hand to create the
animation frames. That was a quick hack. Therefore the program is not very
elegant or easy to use. Send an email if you have questions about the JAVA or
POV code.
This was my first animation project. It took much more time than I had
anticipated, but it was a lot of fun, too. I would like to continue with some
additions to the project; some more fishes or predators; a more realistic
background.

