TITLE: Best Intentions...

NAME: Markus Altendorff
COUNTRY: Germany

EMAIL: maal-irtc20030115@anthrosphinx.de
WEBPAGE: http://www.markus-altendorff.de/

TOPIC: Explosion
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: maal_bst.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Maxon Cinema 4D 9.102 XL and NET


TOOLS USED: 
    Adobe Photoshop, Apple Final Cut Pro HD, Lemkesoft
GraphicConverter


CREATION TIME: 
    About a week of planning, two and a half months of
nothing and about the most hectic week i ever had :)


HARDWARE USED: 
    Macintosh G5 2000 Dual, AMD Athlon, Mac G4 800 Dual


ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 

Do you know that feeling, if you want to help someone and end up 
with making it all much worse...? Tag along with Amurel Kelohar, full-time alien

and part-time would-be protector of mankind, on a mission that sadly 
is not going to end all that well...

*** CONTENT WARNING ***
Contains use of guns, explosions and a very steep drop. You have been warned.


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 


Any MPEG player should do (tested with Windows Media Player, ATI Player,
Quicktime Mac 9/X), including VideoLANclient and MPlayer 2

Side note for Quicktime Player: At least on my machines, the video is
much darker than with any other player i've tried. May be some gamma
table effect or whatever.

Players that do "soft rescaling", i.e. pixel interpolation, give best
results.

Play it at fullscreen and step back to the distance you would use when
watching TV, e.g. 2-3 m on a 19" screen. Or play it at 2x size. Or leave
it at original size. Your choice...

Play it twice. 1. Read the dialogue to get the story. 2. Look at the
video. Sorry for the lots of text, but there's a limit to what story you
can tell with gestures alone...

General recommendation: Make sure to set up the brightness right. By the
way, regarding one comment "it's the artist's job to balance the
lighting" - yes, i try. Really. But it's your job to balance your
screen. The videos look just fine on mine...



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


+ Credits / External sources: 
-----------------------------

Textures of planet earth: NASA Blue Marble Project
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/ "These images are freely available to
educators, scientists, museums, and the public. NASA images are
generally not copyrighted." (NASA Website).


+ Alterations to raw renderings: 
--------------------------------

- Subtitles added in Final Cut Pro - Fade-over between scenes added in
Final Cut Pro - Blur-and-fade during intro: you guessed it ;)

No further enhancements or compositings werde made.

+ Things i hate about it: 
-------------------------

- I totally ran out of time, so some scenes are hurried, textures are
missing, and especially the big explosion at the end is not half as good
as i wanted it to be - but it's three hours to the deadline now, and i
am tired...

- The "breaking test tube" scene at 2 mins 15 secs. is just awful.

- I couldn't animate the last scene with the closing dialogue on time...

+ Things i love about it: 
-------------------------

- I did it! I've got something done for the IRTC after almost two years!

+ Some tech talk: 
-----------------

- I am very impressed with the Release 9.1 of Cinema 4D. Whoa. I never
thought there would be "too much" options in a software... :)

- I've not used computer-solved inverse kinematics for the animation -
using "old-school" forward kinematics gives about enough control and is
much easier to handle. It is not as refined and finished as i hoped it
would be, but after the first steps of designing and planning, i decided
to put up working on it until i had two weeks of holiday right before
the deadline. Bad mistake. About one and half weeks were not available
to 3D work due to other urgencies, so I only started working on this
animation the monday before the deadline. If you're looking for the
reason for this, take a peek at: http://geoimages.berkeley.edu/wwp/ -
there's a reason why one of the organizers has the same name as me ;)

Anyway, i'm really happy i can submit a result at all...

