TITLE: For a claw full of gold.
NAME: DUNCAN GRAY.
COUNTRY: Great Britain.
EMAIL: duncang@eclipse.co.uk
WEBPAGE: http://www.eclipse.co.uk/duncang.
TOPIC: CHASE.
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: dg_charl.mpg
ZIPFILE: dg_charl.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray for Windows ( 3.1g.watcom.win32 ).

TOOLS USED: 
    CMPeg for encoding.
                    Windows Media Player for playing.

CREATION TIME: 
    A large chunk of my spare time over the last three months

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium PII 450, 256 Meg Ram for development,
                    300 MHz AMD, 256 Meg Ram for batch rendering.

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 


Minds from all over the world come together to compete for the prize.
This round, Charlton is permitted a somewhat more direct approach.

        For a claw full of gold


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

It's becoming a bit of a habit of mine to dedicate my movie:

This one is dedicated to the POV-Ray/IRTC admin team, for everything they
do to support the web sites, news groups and POV-Ray community.

I'd also like to thank all the other entrants to the IRTC competitions,
for the time spent building their creations, and for making the competition
so good.


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 

                    No specific viewing requirements.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


(To confirm you have downloaded the whole thing: 1875 frames. 1 Min 15 secs)

I thought about the competition theme for a few weeks before I decided
on the plot. I decided to avoid cars, I wanted a creature (OK, robot)
chase. I finally decided on a two-legged robot, thinking 'Hmm, that'll be
a challenge'. I then spent two months cursing Bi-Pedal life forms for having
a sense of balance.

It took about two weeks to construct Charlton; it took another month of
overnight runs to work out how to animate him and to stop him breaking
apart at the hips. The mathematics still needs a bit of work, I'd have liked
to have replaced the loop in the middle of the main POV file with something
a bit more elegant, but it was working, and time was ticking on, I decided
I better start animating and worry about re-usability later.

Rendering started about the 20th of Dec, once I had developed and previewed
the first 10 seconds or so on my quicker machine, I started my slower machine
rendering, and started developing the next segment. I finished by the start
of Jan, the rendering caught up the next weekend. I had a week in hand, so I
took the opportunity to go back and re-render a couple of bits here that I
wasn't too happy with.

Having first compressed into MPEG, I was rather worried that it wasn't going
to fit in five meg, but with a little playing about with the CMPEG .ctl file
and the addition of the -m1 parameter (the go-slow switch) it squeezed down
to 4.48 Meg - hope it plays OK, seems fine with MS Media Player 2.

After much deliberation, I have again uploaded the source code. However,
I must warn anyone wishing to tinker in the files that I have not had the
time to re-write Charlton since I got him up and running (if you'll
excuse the pun) - the code in here is effectively Beta test - it's not
pretty, and it is not very configurable. Some parameters which can be
passed into the Charlton macro will have little or no effect (being
there for future development) and some parameters which should be passed
into the Macro still have to be set as declares before running the macro.

I won't go into great detail here as to how Charlton walks, for those wishing
to investigate his mechanics, you will find some notes in the top of the main
POV file (charlton.pov). Hopefully these might help explain whats going on.


