TITLE: Running out of time
NAME: Markus Altendorff
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: ma.al@anthrosphinx.de
WEBPAGE: http://www.anthrosphinx.de/
TOPIC: Transformation
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: maaltrns.mpg
ZIPFILE: maaltrns.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Cinema 4D XL v6.3

TOOLS USED: 
    Cinema, Cinema Net, Photoshop for texture and stills preparation,
digital camera (Kodak DC290), Adobe Premiere for the video editing,
GraphicConverter for building the movies from the rendered stills, M.Pack for
converting the MOV file to MPEG.

CREATION TIME: 
    less than 24 hours during 2 days altogether, re-using already
built models.

HARDWARE USED: 
    Apple Macintosh G4 Dual (editing) plus my little render farm G4
single and G3, all others collapsed with "not enough memory" errors...

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 

In short:
Night. A run-down city area. Someone seeking for a hideout - for a reason...
And now:
#include epic.background.story.h
;-)
She's been around for quite some time now, like, millenia? She hasn't aged much,
though. Most of the time she'd sleep in suspended animation, cryostasis, only
thawed by the ship's unrelenting interval timer to check for this planet's
development. Watching the decline over the last few decades wasn't pleasant.
And now this... it was supposed to be a simple walk in the dark, acquiring some
sensor data, when the mirage device that maintained her human look suddenly
went off like an early morning wakeup call after a long night of consuming too
much of what was considered an accepted drug for the masses here. Some hideout
for the moment when the shield would finally falter, transforming her from a
below-average looking human to something a little less ... average, sure would
come in handy... thankfully, the streets were empty at this time before
sunrise, only some cars passing by, nothing to worry too much about. She turned
the corner, crouched down and shielded her eyes from the glaring light that
accompanied any failure or shutdown of the mirage field as the high-pitched
electronic warning whining went from hectic to frantic ...


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 

Should work fine on any screen (tried it on TFT), i've added a test picture at
the beginning of the video which you may use to set up the brightness/contrast
of your screen by stopping playback during that time. The movie itself is
rather dark (intentionally), but i reduced some contrast and added 0.8 gamma to
make it easier for the MPEG compressor. May look a little washed-out depending
on your brightness setting. I've added a few background music suggestions ;-)
since the video itself is without a sound track. :-(


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 

First, the usual note: The result has nothing in common with what i intended.
The video may not even be too much on-topic, but you may imagine me on my knees
pleading for mercy ;-)
Oh, by the way, i remember a comment about my models being "borderline cliche"
in the October 2000-January 2001 round - thanks, i'm trying hard! Most people
will readily buy into cliche anytime, so i try to cater to this audience -
maybe the few times where i airbrushed cars had some bad influence on me :-)
Why i ended up with starting to work on my entry on the evening of Friday, July
13th, two days to the deadline on Sunday, July 15th, is neither a funny story
nor something with a happy ending, but i won't go into that.
I really don't know where the inspiration for the "shadow on the wall" look came
from, but it solved most of the problems i had: Little time for modeling a
human character, little time for fine-tuning the animation, little time for
setting up some facial expressions, little time for rendering complex scenes,
little time for post-production. Plus, it added some mystery to the whole
animation (IMHO), for what better way to trigger the imagination by not showing
a pre-defined image?
With only "2 days, 8 hours" (like the webpage said) remaining, it had to be
something that could be done quick. I started out with shaping the two house
corners, the pavement, the street and the brick wall with simple cubes. The
street lamps are also poorly modelled, just a few "oil tanks" as the primitive
is called in Cinema. I relied heavy on textures to improve the looks, and on
darkness to hide the modelling...
The textures are unretouched photos from a digital camera: Pavement, concrete
walls, brick walls. You can find them (all of them) in the ZIP file included.
No models there, because a) they're in Cinema format, b) they're poor (cubes,
remember?) and c) i won't yet give away the one model that i consider "less
poor" ;-)
The two character models are recyclers of some sort: The "shadow-casting-only"
human female is a standard model that comes with Cinema, the Zygote(tm) Woman,
the other is my Anthrosphinx creature model (rev. 83, comes now with animated
eyelids, a major improvement over rev. 81 (no eyelids) and rev. 82 (texture
errors due to renderer upgrade) ;-)
The garbage cans are from an early (1997?) modelling for a never-finished
animation.
The setup allowed for grubbiness far below what little i consider my "standard".
Since only part of the characters is visible, i didn't stop to make sure that
there's no slip when animating the feet - in fact, i'm not sure if the feet
really touch the ground for most of the animation. IK for the legs is "like,
totally screwed up and such", and i won't go into details like "whatever
happens around frame 750 where the actual transformation is supposed to
happen?"...
The text overlay was added in Adobe Premiere (easier than using the Foreground
texture in cinema which would also have been a possibility). Gamma correction
was done in Premiere, too. MPEG compression by Astarte M.Pack (no longer in
stores after Apple bought the company).
That's pretty much all there is to say about modelling and such. My primary
objective was to get *something* out for this round, for i found the topic
*awesome*. That i'd end up with a rush job was something i never thought of.
Anyway: have fun while you've got the time ;-)

