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- 04-Feb-94
-
- This animation was created using the POV ray-tracer. It is a 61 frame
- animation of a simple scene created with basic 3-D building blocks.
- What I was trying to do with this animation was animate as many POV
- features as I could to see the effects. I also wanted to create something
- that could be run as a loop. Since the animation is only a few seconds long
- having it run as a loop seemed the best thing to do. Also I concentrated
- on the animation not model building. I built the pencil but everything
- else is a POV primative except the pawn that I grabbed from the pawns scene.
-
- I sort of goofed up here and there as it turns out the lighting of
- frame 61 is different from frame 1 but it's not that bad.
-
- The basic animation is as follows:
-
- - First the eyepoint is rotated around the scene.
- - the Green jade pattern is rotating on the sphere.
- - The donut in the center is tumbling is two axis.
- - the Glass cone is spinning in one axis.
- - the Metal sphere is getting more dented frame by frame.
- - the Pawn just sits there. (but what is the texture doing ?)
- - The candy cane (more or less) pencil is spinning about it's tip.
-
-
- Also there are a pile of spot lights moving around the scene. Actually
- all the lighting in the scene is by different colored spotlights.
- There is one reddish spot just below the moving eyepoint that moves with
- the eyepoint you can see the moving shadow of this one.
-
-
- You should find in this archive the following:
-
- README - This file
- SPSLIDEX.PRG - the animator
- FAH1.SPU to FAH61.SPU - the frames of the animation.
-
- How to view the animation:
-
- Just run SPSLIDEX.PRG select animation and execute and the drive
- where the files are (simple eh ?).
-
-
- It should require a 4 meg machine I haven't tested it on anything
- lower. If you don't have a 4 meg machine you can just remove frames and view
- parts of the animation. The archive will un-zip to about 3 megs.
-
- I have converted the images to .SPU format but to save diskspace you
- can use the 'smoosh' feature in animation program to compress the frame files
- to a smaller size.
-
- The only problem I can see anyone having is with the order of the
- frames. The files are loaded into the animator program in the order that they
- are written into the directory. If the animation looks jumbled you will have
- copy the frames one by one into another directory and view the animation from
- that directory. I have added the frames to the archive so they should unzip
- in the correct order. FAH1.SPU is the first one then FAH2 then FAH3 etc ....
-
-
-
- How was it done ?
-
- I did this at work running POV on an IBM 550 R/6000 unix machine.
- it took about 12 minutes to create each frame. Thats about 12 hours to
- do the entire animation. Then the frames were converted to spectrum format
- using Photochrome3. On my Atari ST I think it would have taken
- about 8 months to compute the images. For ray-tracing unix boxes are great !!
-
-
- The animation isn't that bad but it could always be improved. I Gave my
- self a deadline to at least get something out there. I mean I could
- have refined this forever.
-
- I'd like to thank the providers of POV for releasing such a great package
- it's a lot of fun and can create some great pictures.
-
- This is my second shot at a full (512) color animation. I uploaded another
- one in Feb (search under d.dakin1). BTW this animation is public domain but
- for those of you who feel compled to compensate my company for the computer
- time just send me a cheque. (I'll give it to my boss....)
-
- I hope you enjoy this animation I will create more in the future if I
- can get the computer time. I'd like to get some feedback good or bad on
- this. Please feel free to drop me a note at:
-
-
- Genie: D.DAKIN1
-
- Internet: d.dakin1@genie.geis.com
-
- Don Dakin
-
-
-
-