TITLE: The Sneaky Little Checker Gets Crowned
NAME: Jason Dinger
COUNTRY: USA (currently living in Germany)
EMAIL: jasondinger@hotmail.com
WEBPAGE: N/A
TOPIC: Games
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: snkchk.mpg
ZIPFILE: snkchk.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.02

TOOLS USED: 
    pencil and graph paper for modelling, cmpeg for MPEG
            encoding

CREATION TIME: 
    3 hours (counting test renders, etc.)

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 166 w/MMX and 40 MB Ram

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 

 with only 1 opponent left on the board, the lone black checker rises,
checks to ensure that no one is looking, and makes a daring leap over
the red checker to win his crown.

VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 

 actually runs better in Microsoft ActiveMovie Player..(runs a little
too fast with Vmpeg)

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 

 all modelling was done with a pencil and some graph paper.
 the checkers themselves are cylinder CSG objects with phong set to .9
to give them that plastic look.
 the vase in the background is just a sphere with a torus on top, with
a copper texture.
 i actually spent about a week on this, just trying to figure out the
math to get the jump to be smooth (as it's in 2 sections: the ascend
and descend). This was my first animation and also the first time that
i have used POV-Ray's clock function. Once I learned how to use "if",
and "else", the headache with the jump was solved. 
 the crown is made of: Icosahedrons (the diamonds), spheres (the red
and jade jewels), 2 toruses and a cone (which both have a radial 
normal added).

