TITLE: The Lane-changing Incident at the Pan-Compositional Games
NAME: Greg M. Johnson
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: gregj56590@aol.com
WEBPAGE: http://members.xoom.com/gregjohn
TOPIC: Animations
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: lane.mpg
ZIPFILE: lane.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    povray 3.02

TOOLS USED: 
    cmpeg, hf-lab90, CorelPhotoPaint 7

CREATION TIME: 
    5-6 days of rendering

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 200 MHz in Aptiva C9E

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 
    People are still talking about it. The argument over the
Metal Men's maneuver in the final heat against the Yellow_Pines set the tone
for the remainder of the 3001 Pan-Compositional Games.  Was it legal?  You can
decide for yourself in this slow-motion footage.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 
    I created an INC with a human
character whose legs and arms move as a function of the clock. The characters
are blobs. I called the INC several times with different clock variables in
order to create the Yellow_Pine runners.  I then put two different characters
into the same blob statement. This makes up the Metal Men runners. 
The mountain was created with Pov-ray and hflab.  I started out with a zoom-in
on a dark region of the 'bumps' pattern in Pov-ray. Choosing a dark region
enabled me to ensure that the character is at a sort of plateau surrounded by
mountains.  I imported this image into hflab and set tweaked it until it looked
like I wanted (don't remember all the details). 
The camera moves by virtue of  translation and rotation as a function of the
clock with a constant look_at vector. 
I apologize for the distracting effect at the end.  In earlier drafts, the
"Finish" sign was a mere text object hanging in the air. It made many cool
reflections on the runner's body that looked like so many moving tatoos.  A
last minute tweak with ambient and transparency of the sign's texture sort of
ruined the effect. Now, there's distracting, pulsating reflections as the man
runs underneath the sign. I didn't have time to re-render the project.  Some
may find other aspects of the animation disorienting, but most of these are
intentional. 

