TITLE: Star Jump
NAME: Tekno Frannansa
COUNTRY: UK
EMAIL: tek@evilsuperbrain.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.evilsuperbrain.com
TOPIC: Journey
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: starjump.mpg
RENDERER USED: 


        POV-Ray for Windows v3.5



TOOLS USED: 


        Free software:
        
        POV-Ray text editor

         Wings 3D (modelling launch site, asteroids, and space fleet)
          http://www.wings3d.com
          
         Poser 3 (the pilot)

         Virtual Dub (editing and subtitles)
          http://www.virtualdub.org

         TMPGEnc (mpeg encoding)
          http://www.tmpgenc.com


        Trial versions:

        Paint Shop Pro 7
                (captions and computer screen images on the bridge,
                all other textures were made with pov)



CREATION TIME: 


         150-200 hours (estimated)
         Far longer than I've ever spent on an IRTC entry!

RENDER TIME: 

         Most scenes rendered at between 10 and 15 seconds per frame, so:
         12 hours approx.


HARDWARE USED: 


        Athlon 2200 (1800 MHz)
        512MB DDR 3200 RAM
         Shuttle Barebone system



ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 



The maiden voyage of the first ship to be equipped with a "Jump Drive". A device
capable of transporting the ship and crew instantaneously to another point in
the universe. The problem is they have no control over their destination, they
could arrive anywhere within a range of almost 1000 light years.

This means, unlike a conventional test flight, this voyage will last for months,
maybe even years, and the ship is equipped to deal with any situation it may
encounter. It has conventional engines capable of sustaining 0.9 times the
speed of light, which means when it gets close enough to it's destination it
can switch to using them.

But there is a more pressing matter: 17 years ago a fleet of spacecraft were
launched on a mission to colonise a distant planet. Travelling on conventional
engines they can only achieve 0.8 times the speed of light. This may seem slow,
but it means any signal we send to them now won't arrive until 14 years after
they reach their destination. We have discovered that the plants they're
transporting in suspended animation, to terraform the planet on their arrival,
carry a genetic defect that could wipe out their entire food chain within just
a few years. Thier scientists can fix the defect if they know where to look,
but they are unlikely to find it until it's too late.

So the aim of this mission is two-fold; to test the Jump Drive, and to catch up
with the fleet and notify them of this defect...




VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 


There's a lot of black, so I suggest viewing it full screen in a darkened room.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 



concept
=======

I wanted to find a way to combine what I like to create with the topic for this
round. What I tend to create are lots of pretty pictures, generally with a
sci-fi/surrealist feel to them, but with no real relationship between one piece
and the next. And that lead me onto the idea of a jump drive: The jump drive
concept isn't new, it's been used in lots of sci-fi stories before, but this
time I'm using it as a device to portray a journey through space as something
other than just a scrolling starfield!

Obviously I take a lot of artistic license with the places where the ship
arrives. And those places aren't meant to be realistic, this is a fantastical
journey in the style of much more abstract science fiction. Though for you
sci-fi buffs out there I guess we could come up with a techno-babble
explanation that the craft always arrives in areas of equal gravitational pull,
i.e. it's always near some spectacular scenery and not just drifting in space!
:)


design
======

The ship evolved out of some Chris Foss inspired space ships I'd been building,
and the desire to build a detailed but very fast rendering object. Basically
it's just a blob with an image map on it (the image is also generated in pov).
One nice touch is that I rigged up the boosters on the ship to automatically
fire according to the ship's acceleration as it follows a spline.

Most of the scenes were born out of strong images I had in my mind, most notably
the sequence with the ship hovering above the "water". I'm pleased, and
surprised, to say that they nearly all turned out how I wanted. Though most of
them continued to evolve beyond my initial vision.


render techniques
=================

I knew this animation had to be long, which meant I had to render a lot of
frames. So every single scene in this animation is designed to render in about
10 seconds per frame. The slowest goes up to around 20 seconds per frame.

I don't want to go into too much detail (this text file is already quite long!),
but here's some general notes:

Most of the scenes use a sky sphere to fake a more complex effect, e.g. wherever
you see a planet and the horizon line has an atmosphere above it, that
atmosphere is actually behind the planet, on the sky sphere! Also the shot of
the nebula near the end is acheived just using a sky sphere, no media or
anything.

There's a lot of normal maps pretending to be surface details (e.g. the desert
planet, the fleet of ships at the end), and a lot of flat textures pretending
to be normal maps (e.g. the main space ship has no normal map just a texture
with dark and light lines in roughly the right places, and the nebula at the
end has no lighting at all).

Everything is as simple as I could make it, or I didn't put it in. There's no
point having one scene that takes 2 minutes per frame on a project like this,
it would just be unworkable. Unfortunately that means I had to cut a lengthy
flight through a nebula and replace it with the much simpler nebula effect, but
it still looks nice.


details
=======

I haven't provided the source code because it's a sprawling mass of untidiness!
I'm happy to send people an explanation of any of the techniques I've used,
along with relevant bits of source code. Please contact me if you want to know
more :)


Tek
http://www.evilsuperbrain.com

