EMAIL: Johannes.Ewers@t-online.de
NAME: Johannes Ewers
TOPIC: robot
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: soccer
COUNTRY: Germany
WEBPAGE: not yet
RENDERER USED: povray 3.1e
TOOLS USED: 
- Moray 3.1 for all basic modelling,
- Microsoft J++ 1.0 Java development tool,
- Fast Movie Processor for converting images into AVI-clips 
- AVI2MPG V1.8  Mpeg Encoder for coding of final movie
- Photshop 4 for creation of "movie poster"
CREATION TIME: about 60 to 300 seconds/frame, approx. 14 h for all frames 
HARDWARE USED: Celeron 433, 128 MB
VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: MS Media Player works fine
ANIMATION DESCRIPTION
It's soccer time! 
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:
1. All objects (robots, stadium, ball, space objects) were created with Moray. Each robot leg variant was constructed as a seperate object. Legs and robot body are combined by a macro. 
2. The soccer game play was designed (with the help of my son who is a soccer fan). For every robot a path over the play ground was defined. 
3. A Java program is used to generate a sequence of position and rotation vectors following the paths. The position information are saved as intermediate file for every frame.
4. The POV scene file goes through a main loop that reads the intermediate file for a frame, positions all objects , and renders the frame images. The game is rendered with 4 cameras.
5. All frames were assembled with 15 fps into an avi-file. Frame sequences from different camera positions were merged to build the final sequence. The avi was transformed and supersampled into a mpg-files with 30 fps.
As always it took more time than I had antissipated but was a lot of fun too.