TITLE: Travel (travl_lb.mpg)
NAME: Lou Bruce
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: lou_bruce@yahoo.com
WEBPAGE: N/A
TOPIC: Travel
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: travl_lb.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Blender 2.36

TOOLS USED: 
    Blender 2.36 for modeling and animation.
         Image Composer for the Poster, and Textures
          TMPEGnc for adding sound and converting to Mpeg

CREATION TIME: 
    30 days

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD Athlon XP2500, 1GB ram

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 


What does a fish say when he runs into a concrete wall?
A day in the life as a fish travels about his world and suddenly encounters
an unmoveable object.


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
    Windows Media Player

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


This all began when a co-worker, who knows a fish farmer unleashed his
latest catch of fish jokes.

I researched the web for fish pictures, meshes, aquatic plants.
The fish and textures at toucan.web.infoseek.co.jp were totally awesome.
Unfortunately converting them into VRML and importing them into Blender showed
me that they had way too many faces to UV map without going completely insane.
So I modeled my fish from scratch using their fish as a reference.
Then a exported the UV mapping of the mesh as a TGA. Then using Image Composer
I cut and pasted the fish map from toucan to fit my UV map.

The skeleton is simple forward kinetic armatures. The animation uses four
animation cycles:
swim, blink, crash, and headshake. These were sequenced in the Non-Linear
Animation window.

I originally did a simple path animation. Fish follows path, camera follows
fish, lights follow camera.
Then for the crash it was just a little keyframe setting.
My original goal was to synchronize the swim cycle to the music. My best guess
was 24 frames for the cycle, it seemed to work out.

