TITLE: The Early Fly gets the Frog Sandwich
NAME: H.E. Day
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: PovRayGuy@aol.com
WEBPAGE:http://heday.freeservers.com
TOPIC: Alien Invasion
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: earlyfly.mpg
JPGFILE: earlyfly.jpg
ZIPFILE: earlyfly.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    MegaPov+ 0.32     
    
TOOLS USED:
    Adobe Photoshop 4.01, Spatch, DDClip, Windows Sound Recorder, Fast Movie Processor, CoolEdit (for removing static from recordings), AVI2MPG  

RENDER TIME: 
     about 4 days 

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 200Mhz MMX 32MB RAM

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 
This is an animation about Neville Hogwire, his frog sandwich, and a bunch of flies.  Watch it. You'll laugh, gag, and wonder.
Well, I did anyway.
 

HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:
The wizard is a bunch of blobs animated by splines, (in fact, that's pretty much how everything was animated...)  The sandwich is a bunch of blobs and prisms, while the plate and cup were made in Spatch.
The office is a bunce of superellipsoid isosurfaces, with variable textures.  The desk is a height field. The papers are generated by a macro I made.  The flys are simple unions of a sphere and two transparent discs that are randomly rotated.   
Here's an example of the texture used on the birthday cake (and all cartoonish objects).

texture {
pigment {
slope <1/2,-1/8,-1> 
color_map {
[.25 rgb <1,.75,.875>]
[.3  rgb <1,.625,.75>]
[.5  rgb <1,.625,.75>]      
[.55 rgb <1,.5,.625>]       
[.75 rgb <1,.5,.625>]
[.8  rgb <1,.25,.5>]
}  
}
finish {ambient .875 diffuse 0 brilliance 0}     
}

As you can see, it uses the slope pigment pattern to make a nice gradiented shading pattern. 

I used DDClip to help me lip-sync Hogwire's mouth to the audio. One example:
The animation has 100 frames, at a rate of 24 fps.  Go into DDClip, open the sound file you wish to lip-sync, and set the frame rate to 24. 
Zoom in to 2-3 frames per inch.  Now, go frame-by frame and input data, according to the loudness of the sound, into a spline like this:

#declare Spline1 = //Mouth (It doesn't make any blooming sense!)
spline {
cubic_spline   
058,0       
059,1/2       
060,1/2
061,1/4
062,1/4  
064,1/2   
065,1/3   
066,1/3    
067,1/3      
068,1/6      
069,1/6   
070,0 
072,3/4
073,1/4    
075,1/3       
078,1/5     
081,1/3  
083,1/2 
085,1/3  
086,1/7      
089,1/7    
090,1/3    
093,1/5
094,1/4 
096,1/5
100,0
}

Then bring it to a declared variable like so:
#declare MouthOpen = 0+Spline1(clock*100).x //This assumes the clock goes from 0-1

The model you want to have talk should require a MouthOpen variable to be declared. This variable will open the mouth in sync with the sound.  Render the anim out using +kff100. 
Behold! A talking whatever. :)    

And, yes, that is my voice.
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After the helium. 

Enjoy the animation, and please let me know what you think, either by e-mail or commenting.   
Thanks!

H.E. Day
<>< 



P.S. To get DDClip, do a search for DDClip online.  You'll find it.




