TITLE: Stick It!
NAME: Matthias M. Giwer
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: matthias@giwersworld.org
WEBPAGE: A href="http://www.giwersworld.org"Matt Giwer's World/A
TOPIC: Construction
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: stickit.mpg
ZIPFILE: stickit.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.1g

TOOLS USED: 
    mpeg_encode, Gimp for starfield

CREATION TIME: 
    About 48 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    PII/333 Linux 2.2


ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 
    This started as just as a simple version of what I
have in mind for this competition. It worked rather easily in the first
attempt so I made it a bit more complete in case I don't find the time to do
the one I want to do.


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
    A computer is desirable but not manadtory.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


        I could go into a long digression on creating time variant splines
with arbitrary starting points and paths with fixed end points. It would
make for long and dull reading and require much creative BS. Or I could
simply suggest using rand() to set the rate of rotation and translation and
renumbering the frames in reverse order before creating the MPEG. I think
Edison was the first splice a shot in backwards.

        The rest is trivial so far as povray goes but the circular text is
included anyway. I know the expanding ring is dumb but people expect
Lucasisms.

        The promo poster has a better starfield? Isn't the promo always
better than the movie? The real reason is the starfield quality had to be
cut to fit the 5 Meg size limit. The Linux utility ppmtojpeg was used to
convert from the ppm output to jpg with the following switches.

ppmtojpeg --optimize --quality=75 --smooth=50 --dct=float 

        The starfield was created with Gimp but Photoshop will do. Create a
plasma, select a range from a magnitude histogram and apply colored noise to
the resulting image. This gives a vague pattern from the range selection of
the plasma yet retains a random appearance. If you know either Gimp or PS,
that explains how. If you don't, a longer explanation won't help.

        The image of Jupiter was stolen from the NASA Hubble Space Telescope
website. Always steal the largest size available. 

        As to the jpeg conversion that can reduce the size of the resultant
MPEG by 60% and more depending upon the scene. In some cases it does little.
The smooth parameter more or less governs. 

