TITLE: Fire Flies
NAME: Peter Shafer
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: dearmad@teleport.com
WEBPAGE: http /www.teleport.com/~dearmad
TOPIC: Pursuit/Escape
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: firefly.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POLYRAY v1.8(DOS) (A contemporary of POV v2.x)

TOOLS USED: 

Tweener (my own utility) for animation assistance, MORAY v2.02 DOS for most of
my modeling,
Sketchpad, crayons, and water color pencils for concept art (2 days worth before
I touched the
computer), my Wife for loads of ideas, PSP v5 for end title screen, a calculator
for a LOT of math! 
Goldwave for all soundtrack recording and mixing, finally Bink for sound mix-in
and conversion to AVI
and AVI2MPG for final compression.


CREATION TIME: 
    Forty days (nearly full-time). About 50 hours of rendering
time.


HARDWARE USED: 
    PII350 Memory peaked at only 10MB's.


ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 

Three girls pursuing fire flies through the night.  Capturing them and then
letting them ESCAPE into a
beautiful evening sky!  These are big cartoon fireflies, and a few unexpected
events occur.


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 

It is meant to be a night scene, so of course balancing darkness with light was
very tricky.  You may
have to adjust your monitor a little, as we all have our own preferences,
however there *are* details in
the darker parts, so if it's too dark, please adjust!.  And if you have sound,
*please* listen as the
animation is timed to the soundtrack.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 

All models are original and created entirely for this animation.  I began by
thinking about color choice as
I wanted a limited amount of colors and a lot of complementary colors (meaning
echoes of one object's
colors showing up in another completely different object) that would help unify
the "look" of the piece. 
I raided my daughter's crayon box, grabbed 5 colors and used them exclusively
(only mixing allowed). 
Obviously, with crayons in my hand, I was not going for photo realism but a
"cartoonish" look, however
not a flat cartoon look, I wanted to take advantage of the 3D medium I would be
working in.

I designed the characters on paper, including the fireflies, which went through
many versions until
becoming what they are.  The girls I spent about two days designing and failing
to come up with the sort
of "look" I wanted until I stumbled upon a simple "S" curve shape that perfectly
captured the blond girl's
face, and from there I developed their bodies, limbs, and dresses.  I spent a
day coloring them and
sketching them over and over until I understood how I wanted them to "read" on
screen and how I
wanted the colors they shared to relate.  I then set up a forward kinematic (one
day I'll switch to the
WIN Moray and use inverse kinematics -sigh-) model for each character in MORAY
which went
really easily because I had it all designed on paper.

I created a soundtrack, recording and mixing what I needed.   This took a few
days- not as easy to
record crickets as you might think (I ended up looping the crickets but vary the
volume to add interest),
piano was easy in comparison.  I mixed the sound down to 45 seconds worth, and
plotted each scene
to coordinate with the sound.

Once I had my scenes planned I modeled the remaining incidental items I needed
for props (flashlight,
etc...) and then created the little world upon which the short drama would take
place.

The stars are actually little spheres (1000+) strewn about the sky- I used a
little utility I programmed for
that.  The ground is not a height field but a Bezier patch.  It had a nicer
look.

I used spline pathing for movement, including when the blond girl skips and
flies and when the red head
walks around a tree.  Obviously loads for the fireflies.  I programmed this as
an option into Tweener
which is my in-betweening program I developed to make life a lot easier.  While
I programmed
Tweener long ago, I had to go through it and reprogram about 250f it for this
animation (1 week
worth of solid programming).  Tweener is better for it and next animation I do
should go more
smoothly.

The water splash is a particle generator with appropriately hand-coded vectors
for the directions, about
300 blobs, and one day's work for testing.

I set up each scene and then put the script files through Tweener, made
motion-style adjustments
in there and linked splines to objects, then exported them again as .PI files
(Polyray script) and hand-
tweaked the details, then set it loose at night so my computer had sweet
dreams.

Acknowledgments:
This animation would have been impossible but for my wife's ideas during one
night at a tea house. 
She's responsible for more in this animation than I can remember.  Including
being stubborn enough to
insist on better compression for the final submission so that I improved the
final look about 100% by
using every trick I know.  Now that it's all done, I owe her a considerable
amount of my time.  And
yes, my wife is the red head.

