"Highnoon"
IRTC-Entry by Tim Nikias Wenclawiak
Homepage: http://www.nolights.de
Email: tim(REMOVE UPPERCASE)nikias@gmx.net(WARE)
2004, Round 4, Topic Duel

*Warning*
=========
I've scripted this short using POV-Ray for Windows 3.6.1 and assume you're running the same. The only difference from this to other OS' should only be that you have to set the resolution of the output images first before loading and running the INI-Files. I ran them on 320x240, but you may render them at any size.

First things first
==================
To render the scenes, you have to render "mesh_gen.pov" first, you can either run it yourself or simply let POV-Ray render "1st.ini". The file will generate approximately 27MB of meshes for various resolutions and different conditions of the UFO, a high- and low-res version of the crater and the meshes for the jet.

All other INI-Files refer to their source-counterpart. Note that they make it much easier if you just want to render the entire batch, as they will provide frame-rates and antialiasing settings. Keep in mind though that rendering the entire animation can require quite some time, it took a total of approximately 24 hours or so (which might be an understatement, I didn't track the times). Also note that the resolution for the Output isn't set, so if you start rendering at 1280x960, don't blame me for GB worth of images!

Note that Scene 6 originally requires a 2-pass-render. The first will generate the specularity-maps required for the second pass to generate that blinding highlight on the UFO. Nevertheless, this ZIP comes with Jpegs of the required frames and uses those by default. Hence, you may omit the first pass and render the second pass directly unless you want to render your own specularity-maps (which doesn't improve much, to be honest, as the maps will be blurred anyway).

Some extra data is created by the particle-system, as well as various other macros which create Cubic-Bezier-Splines to be used for "shaking" the camera or various objects, this adds another megabyte or so of data (this may be an exaggeration, actually :)

In total, expect the sources to generate an additional amount of roughly 30MB worth of data during rendering.

There are 25 frames per second, adding up to 4025 frames. This adds up to roughly 900 MB of BMPs. So keep that in mind when attempting to render the animation.

Final Notes
===========
1: I've made use of several of my older Include-Files, like my IO-Macros, the Mesh-Modying-Macros or BSplines. I've included them in the ZIP, but you may get updated versions (once they exist) from my website at
http://www.nolights.de

2: I have put some work into cleaning up the mess that is normally called source-code, so I hope you actually have a look at it and didn't just download it to have it rot on your HD. ;)

Have fun,
Tim Nikias v2.0

